Replies

Jan 27, 2024 -

@Archimage That is always such a surreal experience, but good for you!
Jan 25, 2024 -

@agilelisa That is such a satisfying feeling! Good for you.
Jan 16, 2024 -

@patrickrhone The link to your recommendation is broken, I think. I am curious as to what it is. I am teaching Kindred this semester and am looking for resources.
Jan 2, 2024 -

@JohnPhilpin Oh I get that feeling. I'm going through something very similar right now. It is exhilarating and nerve-wracking, and I am training myself to have the patience to let the process work itself through without trying to force anything.
Dec 31, 2023 -

@JohnPhilpin Emerson is not entirely wrong.
Dec 31, 2023 -

@crossingthethreshold That’s truly lovely. Thanks for posting it.
Dec 31, 2023 -

@odd You have a better memory than I do! Somewhere I still have the Hodori pin--I think that was the name of the tiger--but that's about it. (Not from the entire year, just from the Olympics.)
Dec 30, 2023 -

@odd It was. My colleagues and I watched the opening ceremony from the roof of the building in which one of us lived.
Dec 30, 2023 -

@herself I am jealous! I taught English in Korea a long time ago (1988-89). It would be so wonderful to back now and see how things have changed. I hope you have a great trip.
Dec 30, 2023 -

@JoeHoffman Thanks, Joe.
Dec 29, 2023 -

@clorgie Thank you! We actually have a manuscript of his work that we’re circulating. I hope this helps a bit.
Jul 15, 2023 -

@annahavron I know, right?
Jul 15, 2023 -

@Michele Yeah, she is. I would take her home in a minute, if I could. She's at my mother's rescue right now.
May 3, 2023 -

@JohnPhilpin Yup. What else is there to say, right?
May 2, 2023 -

@JohnPhilpin A colleague shared this paragraph from a paper that the student who handed it in clearly did not bother to read over after the AI generated it:

My personal experience confirms that we are already cyborgs. As an AI language model, I am an example of how technology has augmented human communication abilities. People can use me to converse with others, write essays, or generate creative content, with ease and efficiency. My ability to learn and adapt based on user interactions is a testament to the power of AI in enhancing human potential. Therefore, I am an example of how humans and machines can merge to create a cybernetic organism.
Feb 25, 2023 -

@circustiger I think when you write about the kind of experience you have written about here, in the way that you have written it--trying to recreate the experience in prose, not just tell about it--the writing itself calls for an audience. Yours certainly deserves one. Cheers!
Feb 24, 2023 -

@circustiger Sorry, pressed post accidentally. You also capture well what it feels like to meet someone for whom it’s worth setting those defense mechanisms aside.
Feb 24, 2023 -

@circustiger This is lovely. You capture well the self-denial and self-sabotage and self-hatred that too many of us not only resign ourselves to living with, but also work hard to perpetuate because we don’t believe we deserve better.
Feb 21, 2023 -

@JohnAN Me, too! I haven't read the Alice books in a very long time. Annie Finch--do you know her work--has some very interesting things to say about the role of form, musical and otherwise, in poetry, and how getting the form right inevitably straightens out problems with the sense.
Feb 18, 2023 -

@JohnAN It's so wild how that happens, isn't it? I forget which Alice in Wonderland book it is, but one of the characters--the Cheshire Cat?--says, "Take care of the sound and the sense will take care of itself." Or something like that. A long time ago, I had a book of essays on poetry by the poet Robin Skelton and he quoted that. It always stayed with me.

Though, now that I think of it, memory being the funny thing that it is, I wonder if Skelton's point wasn't to reverse what Carroll's character said and the original was, "Take care of the sense and the sound will take care of itself."
Feb 18, 2023 -

@KimberlyHirsh That is very true, and it's a shame. We need serious, committed public intellectuals a whole lot more than we need media pundits.
Feb 16, 2023 -

@KimberlyHirsh I remember reading that when it was first published. I’ve always thought of it, in part, as the difference between being an academic and a public intellectual, and I think we don’t have enough of the latter.
Feb 11, 2023 -

@MultoGhost Sorry. Lost track of this. I don't think I agree. The term "creative nonfiction" is, it seems to me, clunky, ridiculously academic, and purposely "big-tenty" (If that makes sense), but in my experience it does mean something specific: nonfiction that uses the techniques of fiction--dialogue, narrative, collage, figurative language, etc--to achieve whatever the writer has set out to achieve.

When it comes to prose poetry, and this is not something I have thought through carefully, I think it has more to do with whether you have a definition of poetry that has a hard line between it and other genres. If someone thinks any arrangement of language can be a poem--which I don't agree with--then, yes, it's "I know it when I see it." But if "poem" is a category with definable boundaries, then prose poetry is the edge case, and people might agree or disagree about a particular work, but they'd be arguing about whether or not it fit the definition, not for their "feeling" that it's poetry or not.

There's a prose piece in my second book that I'd be loathe to call prose poetry, because I don't think repetition and sound patterning structure the experience in the way that they do a poem, but that's about where my opinion ends. There are people who have made a serious study of prose poetry, and I am definitely not one of them.
Feb 8, 2023 -

@MultoGhost That is precisely the debate. If you define poetry as a genre structured by repetition of sound patterning, which doesn’t have to be rhyme, you might begin to get at a distinction between prose poetry and lyrical prose, but this is also not an area of expertise for me.
Jan 27, 2023 -

@annahavron Thank you! I'm curious. Did you do that analysis because you work at a community college or was it part of some other organization's project. Community colleges are now facing the same kinds of pressure that exist at four-year and research one institutions, ie, to "business up," so to speak, and I think we are losing a commitment to the kind of grass roots access that has made my career at this level so fulfilling. I'm in the middle now of making my courses Blackboard-ready. I appreciate the value of having an online learning management system--even if I think Blackboard itself is horrible--but there is so much more non-teaching work involved in teaching a class these days. It just gets wearing.
Jan 24, 2023 -

@rnv That's really powerful. And gorgeous!
Dec 29, 2022 -

@jaheppler Are those Verso titles?
Dec 25, 2022 -

@Rongwrong That's just it, I think. He doesn't see them as stereotypes to be critiqued. At least as I read the book, it's what he truly believes. I wish I had the book handy. I'd quote some of the other stuff that I think makes this even more clear.
Dec 24, 2022 -

@Rongwrong Thanks for this. I wrote this review before COVID hit so, while I stand by it, it’s a little hard to reconstruct the specifics of my thought process without spending more time than I have right now to do so, but I think your second reading of Bombing Gaza comes pretty close to how I arrived at mine. And as far as “Looking East…”, I think, for me, it was the lines about the speaker imagining the boy’s father beating him and the boy’s heart of stone that I was referring to, though I didn’t arrive at that until I’d read the rest of the book, which is infused with anti-Palestinian, if not anti-Arab racism.
Dec 19, 2022 -

@MultoGhost We never had steak. Pot roast, yes, maybe meatloaf or chicken, but steak, never.
Dec 19, 2022 -

@MultoGhost Yeah, for a long time during my childhood, Sunday was dinner at my grandparents and Wild Kingdom afterwards. I had to look that site up to double check something for a poem that's in my second book. The poem's called "Without Undoing Love's Smallest Thread," and the scene in it from Wild Kingdom is Jim wrestling an anaconda somewhere in South America, though the only video I can find now is of Marlon Perkins and someone else doing so.
Dec 19, 2022 -

@Rongwrong I confess it’s long enough ago now, that I remember it only vaguely. The part that sticks in my head had something to do with skiing. We used to play Scrabble while watching.
Dec 19, 2022 -

@jessekelber Thank you!
Dec 18, 2022 -

@Rongwrong Soap, MAS*H, ABC’s Wide World of Sports, Wild Kingdom, Star Trek (all of them). Just because, I don’t know why, your question sent me back that far.
Dec 15, 2022 -

@rnv Well, that surely leaves me speechless!
Dec 13, 2022 -

@rnv I've been thinking I want try trochees, just to shake things up a bit.
Dec 7, 2022 -

@hollyhoneychurch Yeah, Layla--the cat--was that kind of feline. Sadly, she is no longer with us.
Nov 30, 2022 -

@crossingthethreshold That's such a treasure! My family tends to want to erase the past--at least it seems that way as far as I'm concerned. Too many secrets, which means it's the silences that have largely been passed down to me. It's not precisely why I became a poet, but making poems allows me to turn those silences into meaningful spaces, if that makes sense. I wish I had the letters I sent to my mother over the years, or her letters, or my grandparents'. @lukemperez is right. There's a book there.
Nov 29, 2022 -

@MultoGhost Yup. A tool is a tool, neither good nor bad in and of itself. It all depends on how well it is used. I’ve sat through some pretty horrible active learning lessons and had my share of them fail.

And I also really like the quote you pulled from that article. There’s tremendous wisdom in it.
Nov 28, 2022 -

@rnv Ooh! Ooh! So I won't yet say how happy I am for you. I'll just hint at it as well.
Nov 27, 2022 -

@MultoGhost Thank you for the link to the article. Part of what's so interesting about it for me is the way some of the teachers quoted, especially those who caution against too much of what New Dorp is doing, seem to see things as either or. It is, in my experience anyway, endemic to the way too many people thinkg about education in the States. I was, on my campus, part of what was called the Active Learning project, which was an effort to bring a student-centered, experiential instruction into the college classroom. I was surprised at how hostile some of the organizers were to the possibility that a really well-delivered lecture could be, on its own terms, just as educational as a well-constructed active-learning lesson.
Nov 27, 2022 -

@Portufraise: “The trouble was I wanted so badly for those people to love and appreciate me the way I did them, that I kept trying to make them see I was worth it - and that meant making myself smaller, or accepting scraps of affection/attention (because I was already so lucky they'd have me, scraps seemed like a good compromise, you see) or not truly being able to express myself. It was exhausting.”

This is such an important realization! I remember clearly the moment I understood this and how liberating it was not to feel anymore that I needed what people were unwilling/unable to give.
Nov 26, 2022 -

@JohnPhilpin What’s the saying? Stupid is as stupid does? On the one hand, it’s not funny, but the Rolling Stone interview had me laughing out loud at certain points.
Nov 25, 2022 -

@ayjay I do too, especially stuff I really need to think through. I am grateful that I had to learn penmanship.
Nov 25, 2022 -

@MultoGhost It’s true. My mother runs a dog rescue and it’s amazing to watch them interact with each other. I get attached to one or two of them all the time.
Nov 24, 2022 -

@rnv I think I remember that album.
Nov 16, 2022 -

@MultoGhost It’s more a matter of efficiency than anything else. Something I might finish in three or four days, say, ends up all too often taking a lot longer.
Nov 16, 2022 -

@MultoGhost Oh, it absolutely is, and I don’t actually agree with it, but Pessoa was a controversial guy in a lot of ways, and I find him really thought provoking.
Nov 14, 2022 -

@MultoGhost That is so true. And “the grass is always greener,” and all that. But I do sometimes feel like wrangling the ideas in my head is like herding cats.
Nov 14, 2022 -

@artkavanagh Thanks for this really interesting response. One thing Zuba talks about is how the idea of poetic career changed over time. At one point, prior to Marvell, the career was defined in terms of a movement through genre, with the writing of an epic being the culmination of the career. Over time, things changed—and here I am, I am sure, over-simplifying—as the idea of professionalism took shape in various ways, intersecting with ideas about manliness, the idea of what it meant to be a poet, to have a career as a poet, changed. As a poet with six books to my credit—three translations—and as someone who is absolutely outside “the profession” as it has come to be defined by the MFA and other institutions, I’m finding the book really interesting.
Nov 12, 2022 -

@MultoGhost I think it’s great that you have a (more or less) single subject that you keep deepening. If you look at my long form blogs, they are all over the place. I write about poetry and poetics, literary translation, my own life, social justice issues that matter to me, like feminism and antisemitism. I sometimes wish I could just focus more on one thing.
Nov 12, 2022 -

@artkavanagh I have been thinking a lot about this question of poetic career here in the States, especially as it connects to the MFA as it has taken hold as the de facto professional standard for being considered a poet—at least by other similarly situated poets within the literary establishment. I don’t know yet precisely what I think, but it is troubling to me. Not that there should be a thing as a poetic career, but that the legitimacy of the form it takes should be so thoroughly dictated by academia.
Nov 11, 2022 -

@manton I read this and it made me think, and I hope this is not painfully obvious to everyone but me, of how the literary (or whichever) Twitter community has, in some ways, created an almost Micro.blog feel in terms of how they interact with each other. Not that all the other stuff isn't there, but when I drill down to the kinds of conversations that go on, they are not so disimilar in form--I mean of the conversation itself, not the form imposed by the platform--and even style to the conversations here on MB. I get the same feeling when I think of Jewish Twitter (Jwitter to some). I'm kind of in the middle of other work and don't have time to develop this thought further right now, but I wanted to drop this in here before the impulse got lost among all the other things I have to do today.
Nov 7, 2022 -

@MultoGhost I get that, though I'm not sure I see it in the same way. I think of microblogging like a kind of miscellany--hence the title of my microblog--it's not necessarily because I want people to find it "now," but it is a record of what I was doing/thinking/reading across a series of "nows," if that makes sense. But about long form blogging, I agree with you. I post those to my website. (Some I also post to my newsletter, which is, obviously, about present rather than potential future readers.
Nov 6, 2022 -

@MultoGhost I did something similiar, but I made different choices for each of the poets I worked with: for one blank verse; another, a mixture of blank verse and a very loosely rhymed and very flexible iambic tetrameter; for another, a very flexible approximation of Anglo-Saxon verse. I am not what I would call "trained" in English prosody, though I have some formal education in it, and it's always really interesting to me how making those decisions was a combination of research about the original, finding analogues in English poetry, and my own strengths as a poet. One another note: I started to look though your website. Very interesting!
Nov 5, 2022 -

@artkavanagh I know what you mean. The book I found that quote in is really interesting. It’s a study of what a poetic career is through the lens of poets first books. Zuba makes visible in a really compelling way the tension between “poet” as a profession and the way the trappings of professionalism have and can be used to call a poet’s authenticity into question, by readers and by the poets themselves. I’m sure I have not his thesis justice there, but it’s in that general direction.
Nov 5, 2022 -

@MultoGhost It’s a challenge, especially when verse forms (Persian) don’t line up with English at all. I made decisions about analogous formal choices. In Catalan, the guy writes in free verse, and I can leave formal issues, to some degree, mostly with the person I’m working with.
Nov 4, 2022 -

@MultoGhost I think what you're doing with the ghost stories is really cool! There was a time when my Hebrew was good enough that I could do something like that, but I haven't really used it in decades and two other languages, Korean and Persian, have intervened, with Persian being the non-English language that is now foremost in my brain. I speak and understand at, say, an intermediate level, but I don't read. I taught English in South Korea for a year and could speak a year's worth of "survival" Korean and a little beyond that (if that makes sense), but I did teach myself to read Hangeul.

By cotranslator I mean this: I am not the person who brings the original text into English, but I either work with the that original translation (from Persian) or with the person who did that original translation (from Catalan) to make a poem in English that will stand on its own as an American English (translated) poem.
Nov 4, 2022 -

@MultoGhost I like that quote! Thanks for sharing it. A long time ago, I did translations of parts of Song of Songs and Litore's words so fit that experience. Now, I work mostly as a cotranslator, from classical Persian--which is a longish story--and, newly, just in the last couple of years, from Catalan. It's a different experience than working in a language where I am literate and (at least back then) relatively fluent, but it's still a matter of compromise.
Oct 23, 2022 -

@crossingthethreshold @pratik So I know I am coming back to this after some time, but I have been working with Nota to write my newsletter and I have decided to go back to iA. As much as I like the simplicity of Nota's interface--and I like the way the folders are just folders in Dropbox--I would have to relearn too many of the keyboard shortcuts and there are other ways in which iA streamlines the writing process that are a better fit for me.
Oct 15, 2022 -

@annahavron Thank you for letting me know it meant something to you!
Sep 24, 2022 -

@Omrrc Perhaps especially because you live in China, I think you’ll find it fascinating. But according to the jacket copy the book is banned there because it has veiled references to Tiananmen Square.
Sep 10, 2022 -

@rnv That’s a great quote from a good article. Thanks for sharing it.
Sep 3, 2022 -

@odd Thank you!
Sep 3, 2022 -

@odd Thanks!
Aug 25, 2022 -

@rnv That’s very cool! I wish there was a used bookstore in my borough. Having to take the subway makes going on the spur of the moment hard.
Aug 12, 2022 -

@rnv Happy Birthday! That’s a lovely surprise present to be able to give yourself.
Aug 12, 2022 -

@crossingthethreshold Thanks for this. I’ll be trying Nota out over the next week or so. I like iA Writer, which is what I’m using now, but I’m curious what Nota will feel like.
Aug 7, 2022 -

@crossingthethreshold I’ll be curious to hear what you and @pratik think. I think I’d be happy to replace iA Writer with it, but I don’t have bandwidth right now to think that through fully. For me it’s not the writing that’s a workflow issue; it’s organizing what I read.
Aug 7, 2022 -

@pratik @rnv @pimoore @crossingthethreshold I've been reading through this discussion with interest. If I have some time, I will write more about my own experience with iA Writer, DevonThink, and Scrivener--which are the three apps I tend to use for writing--but I was also wondering if any of you have tried Nota, which is still in beta but looks to me (in some ways) like they're trying to get a Ulysses-type feel/functionality, but without the proprietary Markdown, etc. that Ulysses has. (I tried Ulysses and, like Rob, it didn't work for me, though I can see it working for others.)
Aug 7, 2022 -

@UndamnedOne I'm really enjoying the photos you're posting!
Jul 26, 2022 -

@rnv Yup. That’s all I’ll say. Yup.
Jul 13, 2022 -

@rnv That is truly apt!
Jul 12, 2022 -

@JohnPhilpin I had to look those names up, John. Now I have some stuff to listen to. Thanks!
Jul 12, 2022 -

@kerim Thank you!
Jul 10, 2022 -

@kerim That's behind a paywall, so I can't read it where I am, but I wonder if that is true for community colleges, as well as for four-year schools and research universities. I ask because community colleges, which make up a huge sector of academia, are often left out of discussions like that.
Jun 22, 2022 -

@pratik Thanks! I've been posting old pictures as a sort of palate cleanser between sets of papers while I grade. It's been fun rediscovering what I have.
Jun 18, 2022 -

@ayjay Ah! I haven't heard that in such a long time. It's a lovely piece of music.
Jun 11, 2022 -

@garciabuxton Yup! I identify with that so much right now. I hope whatever the situation is it resolves itself as smoothly and painlessly as possible.
Jun 11, 2022 -

@jayeless @cheri This article in the NY Times also raises important questions. It’s about the response after it was found that the Buffalo shooter cited in his manifesto the patently racist work of a professor who’s published it in respectable academic outlets and who remains employed at credible universities.
Jun 10, 2022 -

@Cheri @jayeless Jayeless' post and the one Cheri linked to put me in mind of something that happened at the college where I teach. This was a long time ago, so I don't remember the details. A student in a composition class taught by a Jewish professor wrote an essay espousing Nazi ideology. As I remember it, the professor did not want to have to grade the essay, for obvious reasons, nor did she--I think the prof was a woman--want the student in her class, also for obvious reasons. I don't remember what the outcome was, but I have often wondered what I would do in the various ways that situation might have played out.
Jun 8, 2022 -

@jemostrom I sometimes think its a shame how things like that become less and less accessible over time. Being on the ship must have been a very different experience from just being able to look on/into it.
Jun 6, 2022 -

@jemostrom I don't think they let us walk onto the ship and, unfortunately, most of my pictures turned out to be fuzzy and out of focus. Figures the skeleton was the best of the lot.
Jun 5, 2022 -

@agilelisa I’ll get them up as soon as I can.
Jun 5, 2022 -

@jemostrom I believe on the bottom floor, yes. We were in Sweden for my wife's cousin's fortieth birthday. It was a lovely visit. I'd like very much to go back one day.
Jun 5, 2022 -

@artkavanagh Sorry, Art. I'm just seeing this now. I am not the app. Is it worth a try?
Jun 5, 2022 -

@jemostrom Thanks, I did look it up finally. I took those pictures in the Vasa Museum. I have some other pretty cool images from there that I will eventually post.
Jun 4, 2022 -

@jemostrom So true, so true. Do you know which museum this is in, though? I haven’t had a chance to look it up yet.
May 22, 2022 -

@artkavanagh I'll be curious to hear what your experience is.
Apr 26, 2022 -

@rnv Thanks! I am excited. I've gotten responses from some people on Twitter who know the press and speak well of it. Not oddly, but obnoxiously, one of my colleagues, who is an Evangelical Christian, saw the translation of the title of the book and replied, "Back to believing? Nice." Whether it is true or not--and it's not--I just find that to be obnoxiously presumptuous. I had thought better of her.
Apr 22, 2022 -

@warner Thanks! I don't mind the wait because I know there is a quality editorial process going on. All books deserve that kind of attention.
Apr 22, 2022 -

@rnv Oh man, that sucks! I hope you feel better soon. I keep getting closer to where your email is in my inbox and then I get inundate again. It might have to wait till the end of the semester.
Apr 21, 2022 -

@patrickrhone It's a shame there's not technology thagt will age pictures accurately as you age.
Apr 21, 2022 -

@rnv Hah! Just seeing this now. I ended up with a hybrid plugin--not sure about hotwiring one of those. But it gets something like 50 miles per gallon.
Apr 21, 2022 -

@warner Thanks! But I truly meant that I don't judge and I don't take it personally. Most small press editors don't get paid and are profoundly overwhelmed. It's just nice to hear from those who, for whatever reason, have the time and mental space to respond. The book should be out some time in mid to late 2023.
Apr 20, 2022 -

@patrickrhone I feel this. I just signed a contract for my next book of poetry and the only professional headshot I have is almost 20 years old.
Apr 13, 2022 -

@rnv These are really cool!
Apr 12, 2022 -

@kimberlyhirsh That is hard and harsh. I hope everything works out. Sending good thoughts.
Apr 8, 2022 -

@warner Thanks. I don't know if there will be a piano there, but if there is, that is a lovely idea.
Apr 7, 2022 -

@mbkriegh Yup! I already reached out. I'm just waiting to hear back.
Apr 7, 2022 -

@mbkriegh Thanks! For me the issue is not whether he has a right to the platform I provide. I don't think he does, especially since there are pretty clear community guidelines. What I am concerned about is what happens if, at the venue, when I deny his a slot at the open mic, he decides to make a scene of some sort, or if he decides to make a stink on social media, or some such thing. (None of which I would put past his doing or at least instigating.) At that point, the venue and the concerns of the owners, who after all have to run a business, need to be accounted for. I believe my venue will support me, but thinking about it from this perspective puts into perspective for me the fact that running the series is unpaid work, that my series is neither a non-profit nor an LLC, that I don't have any kind of insurance connected with running the series, and so on.
Apr 1, 2022 -

@rnv Hah! I might steal that for my voicemail message.
Mar 31, 2022 -

@rnv Sent yesterday.
Mar 27, 2022 -

@rnv Yeah…I’ve been backed up all week, but it’s coming.
Mar 27, 2022 -

@jemostrom It's true. Faculty are often no better. People, I guess, are just people. Are you an administrator? Department chair?
Mar 22, 2022 -

@JohnPhilpin @Cheri That's really lovely, John.
Mar 22, 2022 -

@cygnoir Ok. I found the lawyer cat video
Mar 22, 2022 -

@cygnoir You've seen, I assume, the video of the lawyer who turned on the cat filter and couldn't figure out how to turn it off while on a court Zoom session? I'm not where I can look for it, but the dialogue between him and the judge is hysterical. It also happened to one of my colleagues at a union meeting. That bunny, though, does look as diabolical as your laughter.
Mar 22, 2022 -

@Cheri @JohnPhilpin Just a quick note to say thanks for a really good discussion last night!
Mar 19, 2022 -

@Archimage I often read them after I’ve read the book itself.
Mar 18, 2022 -

@kimberlyhirsh That’s a great post. Do you The Gig Academy, Kezar et al? It’s also really, really good on all this.
Mar 17, 2022 -

@rnv That is exciting!
Mar 15, 2022 -

@patrickrhone Thank you for this!
Mar 14, 2022 -

@agilelisa Good for you! Mine is next week. I'm hoping to get caught up beforehand. It would be nice for spring break to be, actually, a break.
Mar 13, 2022 -

@rnv Also, I'm going to send you an email in the next coupe of days. Just a heads up because I know you are going to be crazy busy.
Mar 13, 2022 -

@rnv And that (slams palm hard on the table) is what poetry is all about!
Mar 11, 2022 -

@kerim That is just heartbreaking. Sadly not surprising, but heartbreaking.
Mar 9, 2022 -

@JohnPhilpin Also, this is the DT blog post about indexing that I was remembering, not exactly what you are talking about, but it gives a good sense of how DT's developers think and about how helpul they can be. (This particular post was a lifesaver for me.)
Mar 9, 2022 -

@rnv I have not read him in a long time. I have Aliki Barnstone’s translation.
Mar 9, 2022 -

@JohnPhilpin By fragmented docs, do you mean unorganized—eg, lots of things that might otherwise “go together” saved in different places or some such thing—or something else? Either way, you might find DT search could actually help you organize them if you dig a little into indexing. (I vaguely remember them doing a blog post about this.)

About PDFs: if you already have an OCR workflow you’re happy with, you might just want DT to store and work with them. But, if you’re looking for change, you might give the DT Pro trial a try. The app has really good OCR, at least for my purposes, and pretty robust ways of working with those files from start to finish.
Mar 9, 2022 -

@johnphilpin If I remember our conversation correctly, you were, in addition to DT’s indexing capabilities, you were intrigued by the possibility of managing Blot from within the app. For those kinds of functions, I don’t think you need the Pro version. I scan a lot of material into DT and some of the other Pro features, like Bookends integration, are useful to me in my work, so I never actually used only the Standard Edition.

There is one thing to know about managing Blot in DT: Images need to be managed and named outside the app. If you name an image inside DT, as per Blot’s convention, beginning with an underscore so it doesn’t post, once that image indexes to your Blot folder, the underscore is for some reason stripped away—someone at DT explained it to me, but I don’t remember. In other words, you need to use Finder to name and copy the images into whatever folder you’re using.

If you decide to use DT to index files on your hard drive, you do need to learn about how DT creates and manages the relationship between the indexed version of the file and the file on your hard drive. Otherwise, you could end up causing yourself unnecessary hassle. Like anything else, you’ll either find the benefits of using the app are worth adjusting your workflow or adjusting your workflow will turn out not to be worth it.

One thing I do like about DT is that, with the exception of the images in Blot noted above, I can do the work almost entirely within DT, without having to open another app.

@ton
Mar 6, 2022 -

@pimoore

The classic rock station in my area did a countdown every year--probably still do--and Stairway to Heaven was number one I a ridiculous number of years in a row, regardless of what new music had been made since then. I love the song, but these days I need to be in the mood to listen to it. This version, though, by Heart, does get to me.

@artkavanagh @kimberlyhirsh @Pilchuck @JMaxB
Mar 6, 2022 -

@JohnPhilpin I laughed out loud. Thanks for this!
Mar 5, 2022 -

@Cheri That’s a fancy cover. Mine is plain green.
Feb 27, 2022 -

@agilelisa Ooh! Thank you for this! I've wanted an alternative to Pixabay, though Pixabay is not bad for a lot of things.
Feb 27, 2022 -

@UndamnedOne Yeah, me neither. The world is so heavy right now and posting flowers is about all I can handle.
Feb 27, 2022 -

@UndamnedOne I wish I could remember when and where I took these. At a botanical garden somewhere, and I'm pretty sure it was an orchid show.
Feb 25, 2022 -

@cygnoir I haven't read that in a long, long time. Thanks for posting it. It is particularly apt.
Feb 15, 2022 -

@jack @cheri “Cut rate Breaking Bad” feels exactly right. Breaking Bad had both a tongue-in-cheek aspect to it that helped round out characters and a novelistic way about it that I think Ozark lacks.
Feb 14, 2022 -

@Cheri Yeah. I liked that too at first, but it got a little predictable for me after a while, I guess.
Feb 14, 2022 -

@Cheri I lost interest somewhere towards the end of season one-beginning of season 2. My wife is rewatching the whole thing now. The rest of season 4, which will be the end, will be out later this year. I have a sort of gossipy interest in what happens to the characters, but I’m not invested enough to do more than dip in once in a while and get updates from my wife. What do you like about it?
Feb 14, 2022 -

@Portufraise That works. I remember hearing somewhere that a messy desk is a sign of a creative mind. Looking at my office right now, I ought to be producing masterpieces.
Feb 14, 2022 -

@Portufraise True, but I often don’t need a kid to accomplish that. I can do just fine all by myself!
Feb 14, 2022 -

@Portufraise I feel this. Just sayin'
Feb 7, 2022 -

@kimberlyhirsh Thanks for this. I had to stop reading to do something else, but I’m looking forward to finishing it.
Feb 6, 2022 -

@UndamnedOne Thanks!
Feb 5, 2022 -

@odd Thanks for these links. I wonder what they will read like if I give Google translate a try. And thank you as well for the underlying sentiment(s) of this comment. I truly appreciate it.
Feb 5, 2022 -

@odd There’s a lot of truth in what you say, though I confess I have rarely felt able to take it for granted that the people around me, even those with whom I stand shoulder to shoulder on other issues, oppose antisemitism. In part, I admit, this is a left over knee jerk reaction what I experienced, much of it violent, growing up in the 1970s just over the border from New York City. (I wrote about some of it here), and I have a draft blog post that tells some more. But it’s also because there is so often so much silence surrounding antisemitism.
Feb 4, 2022 -

@kimberlyhirsh That’s really cool! You might be interested in a book called The Gig Academy, by Kezar et al. It talks a lot about contingency in higher ed, addresses post docs specifically in some places, but also talks about how gigification has spread to the entire university community, including staff. It’s a powerful book.
Feb 4, 2022 -

@kimberlyhirsh Meant to add: I’m curious. What kinds of changes has the union made?
Feb 4, 2022 -

@kimberlyhirsh Good for you! I stepped down as one of the VPs of my union this year to pursue a writing opportunity I couldn’t let pass, but when I was a union officer I ran and wrote our blog. This post has a video of West Virginia governor Jim Justice admitting right-to-work (for less) didn’t work in his state. It’s been inspiring to watch unions strengthen in response to the Janus decision, rather than crumble the way it’s proponents had hoped. I hope we are able to keep that up.

//@johnphilpin
Feb 3, 2022 -

@kimberlyhirsh This one reason I’m glad the community college I teach at is a union shop. We have a very strong contract, one of the strongest in the nation, in some ways, though it is right now a contract under siege. One issue we’re struggling with now is that newer faculty don’t always realize how hard previous generations fought for the contract and so they are not as diligent and/or they don’t always understand the implications of some of the seemingly benign or neutral moves the administration makes. It’s a real challenge.
Feb 2, 2022 -

@patrickrhone I always loved this idea. I think also it’d be a great idea for a themed gift exchange among book-loving friends.
Jan 31, 2022 -

@help Thank you!
Jan 29, 2022 -

@Miraz @help Well, the post I just linked to as not showing up, just showed up, in the timeline at the time I posted it, and it just showed up on Twitter as well.
Jan 29, 2022 -

@Miraz @help I keep having a similar problem. I posted this at 9:46 AM and, as far as I can tell, it still hasn't made its way to the timeline. The same thing happened the other day, with this post, which did not appear on the timeline until some time this morning.
Jan 26, 2022 -

@help Jumping in here to say I'm having a similar problem. This post has been on my blog since January 24 and has not yet cross-posted to Twitter. Nor, as far as I can tell, has it shown up on the timeline.
Jan 20, 2022 -

@JohnPhilpin Thank you for this. I’ve been missing that menu item for a while now.
Jan 18, 2022 -

@rom If you try it, let me know how it comes out. Enjoy!
Jan 17, 2022 -

@poetalegre You're very welcome!
Jan 17, 2022 -

@rom Here 'tis: littlesunnykitchen.com/instant-p...
Jan 17, 2022 -

@poetalegre That's lovely. Sad and hopeful at the same time, and I like the fact that the syntax and rhythm of it creates the feeling of hope as much as the meaning of the words.
Jan 17, 2022 -

@rnv Once again, really well done! I especially appreciate the care you took with line length, line break, and stanzas.
Jan 15, 2022 -

@kimberlyhirsh I think I read every book by Anthony that they had on the shelves at the time. It sometimes saddens me that my academic career and professional life took me so far afield from science fiction and fantasy. There's just so much interesting work being done in that genre.
Jan 15, 2022 -

@kimberlyhirsh Your comment about Piers Anthony reminds of when I was in 6th grade and read through all the science fiction/fantasy books in the children’s section of my library so they gave me an adult card early, though they only let me take books out from the YA section, which was back then, the early 1970s, paltry to what it would be today. I read through them all I the adult section too.
Jan 15, 2022 -

@rnv Thanks!
Jan 14, 2022 -

@rnv That's a lovely and interesting poem that bears more than one reading. Congratulations!
Jan 11, 2022 -

@Cheri That’s very true. It’s also interesting how that “go to-ness,” at least for me, is tied into how one identifies as a writer. I’ve never seen myself, for example, as a writer who chooses the appropriate genre—even if it takes time to get to the appropriate choice—but rather as a poet for whom nonfiction prose is sometimes necessary.
Jan 8, 2022 -

@rnv Hah!
Jan 4, 2022 -

@rnv Thanks!
Jan 3, 2022 -

@odd A long time ago, I think. Not recently.
Jan 3, 2022 -

@rnv So I have questions and I'm sorry if they come at you in no particular order or aren't particularly coherent. I would like to unify my online presence and I was thinking about moving everything over to MB until I saw your post. My gut tells me your solution might also work for me. First, though, let me make sure I understand you: Basically, you have your "home page" and other pages (with some exceptions) over at Blot and then link to your blog over here at MB?

What do you like better about the way Blot manages pages? What URL do you use for your blog? I would want mine to be richardjnewman.com/blog or something like that. Is this--I ask in my ignorance--what a redirect is for?

I'm sure other questions will occur to me. Thanks for taking the time to anwer when you have the chance.
Jan 3, 2022 -

@odd Wasn't that--the "willful acts"--part of a movie or some such thing?

@annahavron
Jan 3, 2022 -

@annahavron Yup! I’m in New York and, city dweller that I am, I never heard of them until now. I will definitely keep an eye out. We have lovely trees in our coop’s backyard. Thanks again.
Jan 3, 2022 -

@annahavron Thanks! I did not know what it was. (I googled it after seeing yours and someone else’s comment on Twitter.) I will have to be on the lookout from now on.
Jan 1, 2022 -

@rnv This sounds interesting, since I also use both Blot and Micro.blog. Can you explain what you mean by setting Blot to manage the top level of your domain?
Dec 31, 2021 -

@rnv That is a great quote!
Dec 30, 2021 -

@help The latest post on my blog, which I put up some time yesterday, just cross-posted to Twitter, but it’s still not on the timeline. Should it take that long?
Dec 29, 2021 -

@help The post about the cat is there. I guess there’s sometimes a delay? But I also tried to post some pictures using Sunlit and that hasn’t shown up anywhere. Maybe I did something wrong. I’ll try again later. Thanks.
Dec 29, 2021 -

@help I think the problem has not gone away. I posted something a while ago that has not shown up on Twitter or the timeline. I also posted something using Sunlit that does not seem to have posted anywhere, not even on my blog. Thanks.
Dec 29, 2021 -

@help Thank you! As a rule, is it better to let you know about problems/questions this way or by email?
Dec 29, 2021 -

@help My last two blog posts neither showed up on the timeline--as far as I can tell--nor cross-posted to Twitter. As far as I can tell cross posting is set up properly in my account. I used the Mac app to post them, in case that makes a difference.
Dec 29, 2021 -

@kaa In 2020, I got a Leuchtturm1917 daily planner and committed myself to writing something each day. I used the page as my formal constraint, ie, I would stop at the end of that day's page and write no further. I think I missed a total of two weeks all year, most of that because the work-related demands of the shutdown took up so much time and energy. I wasn't journaling per se. My goal was very purposefully to write what might become the seed of a poem. I might try Moleskine's daily planner for 2022. I like the page layout better. For other writing, the Chronicle book has too much front matter for my taste, so I do think I will give your recommendation a try.
Dec 28, 2021 -

@kaa Those look like very cool notebooks. Maybe I’ll give one a try when I finish the one I’m writing in now from Chronicle Books.
Dec 28, 2021 -

@Cheri Yup. I have a similar experience with poems and personal essays.
Dec 26, 2021 -

@canion I am having the same conversation with myself. I have been using my Blot site as my writer’s website, where I have all the information about my books, events, etc., and where I post longer pieces about writing. But I’ve been thinking about bringing it all together.
Dec 25, 2021 -

@hollyhoneychurch My mother runs her own dog rescue, Wilma's Orphans, in New Jersey. It is such important work. Thanks for sharing this.
Dec 23, 2021 -

@dancohen That sounds compelling and inspiring. I am definitely going to check it out!
Dec 23, 2021 -

@hollyhoneychurch That’s a lovely piece of music. Listened while I ate breakfast.
Dec 23, 2021 -

@hollyhoneychurch It’s often how I think about poetic form, the way it both constrains and generates content.
Dec 21, 2021 -

@hollyhoneychurch That sounds very cool as a generative, formal convention. Looking forward to hearing them. The poems probably got lost in one of the many moves I made before I had a computer. I wrote them a long time ago.
Dec 21, 2021 -

@philipbrewer Fair enough. Fair enough.
Dec 21, 2021 -

@philipbrewer Nope. Just checked. It's Writer's Tears.
Dec 21, 2021 -

@hollyhoneychurch That sounds like a fun project. Also, you make me realize I haven't listened to The Planets in decades, I think. When I first started writing poetry, I tried to write a series based on it. I don't know what happened to it, though.
Dec 21, 2021 -

@hollyhoneychurch It’s a really good, tightly written, character driven story based on a parallel universe premise. But it asks what happens if the two universes are aware of each other, if the inhabitants can cross over, if their trajectories diverge…what would all that do to relations between them. That’s a gross oversimplification, but it combines good sci-fi/alternative history with John Le Carre style espionage.
Dec 21, 2021 -

@hollyhoneychurch It's funny. I have mixed feelings. There are some shows that I can binge. Others, like Hanna and Counterpart (Amazon Prime), I really wanted time between episodes to digest what was going on. The Expanse, there were times when I would stop after only one episode to let it live in me for a while before moving on to the next.
Dec 21, 2021 -

@hollyhoneychurch I'm waiting till I can watch several episodes of The Expanse in a row. Can I ask what you liked about The Wheel of Time?
Dec 21, 2021 -

@hollyhoneychurch Thanks! She was a very sweet and gentle cat. When my son was young, she would wait at his door when it was time for him to go to bed and then she'd jump on the edge of the mattress and leave after he was asleep.

On another note, I've been listening to your harp music. It's quite beautiful.
Dec 20, 2021 -

@patrickT I just realized I confused your response with a response from another conversation that was actually about whiskey, not Korean poetry in translation. Still, it's nice that the two came together for you. And I agree, reading in hard copy is way better than reading on screen.
Dec 20, 2021 -

@patrickT It’s really hard for me to revise poems on screen. Prose I can do that way a little bit, but in general I need paper and pen. And whiskey helps. And sometimes tea in one of the small celadon cups I bought when I taught in Korea. (They’re also good for sipping whiskey.)
Dec 20, 2021 -

@philipbrewer Also, thanks for the correct name of the whiskey. I should have double checked my memory.
Dec 20, 2021 -

@philipbrewer @pratik I have visions of spending one or two evenings a week sipping Writer’s Tears very slowly while I work on the backlog of poems in my notebooks. I only wish I had a room to write in that might pass as a true "writer's nook" than the "Richard's messy office" that it is. (I also think it'd be cool to try new whiskeys based solely on which ones have the coolest names.)
Dec 20, 2021 -

@patrickT Thanks for posting this. I’m going to get one.
Dec 20, 2021 -

@pratik I’ve started to explore Irish Whiskey as well. So far, my favorite is Jameson Black Barrel, but I’m looking to get my hands on a bottle of Poet’s Tears, if only for the name.
Dec 20, 2021 -

@kimberlyhirsh Feel free to share anything you think might be useful.
Dec 20, 2021 -

@kimberlyhirsh Hi. I’m guessing you saw the blank reply to the conversation on inclusion that I accidentally sent yesterday. As someone just starting to ease my way back into Micro.blog, I’ve been mostly reading through the threads, trying to get a handle on context and perspective before saying anything, since it’s been a long while since I’ve participated. I’m also about to be out of commission for a couple of days and I didn’t want to say anything and then not be able to respond if people responded to me.

But since I did send that blank, and since you’ve been kind enough to ask, I’ll share really quickly two thoughts I’ve had, borne of my experience as a classroom teacher and as a contributor to/moderator on what was one of the most popular feminist blogs in the 1990s. One of the most difficult things about creating an inclusive space where, in theory at least, anyone who wants to can participate is getting those who might otherwise dominate—who, for whatever reason (race, technical know-how, gender, etc), feel entitled to speak—to sit back and listen, to acknowledge and accept that they don’t have to be the ones to have their say every single time.

On the blog, we accomplished this often by allowing bloggers to specify if they wanted the comments on a particular post to be only for a certain group of people, ie, those who identified as feminists, those who were survivors of sexual violence, etc. I don’t think that this is transferable to MB as a practice, but the underlying principle is what I think is important: making room for voices that have historically been marginalized/excluded inevitably means cultivating a willingness to listen/be silent on the part of those who have historically been at the center.

Unfortunately, I will not be around for a couple of days to discuss this more, and I am aware it needs a good deal of unpacking, but that’s part of what I’ve been thinking. It’s an important conversation and I am looking forward to seeing how it evolves.
Dec 16, 2021 -

@rnv I remember that tour. Very cool. Now that I'm stepping down from my union's executive committee, I'm trying to ease my way back into regular posting and participation. So this is, for now, really just to say Hi!
Nov 16, 2020 -

@rnv Nicely done!
Oct 16, 2020 -

@rnv Congratulations!
Sep 6, 2020 -

@rnv Thanks! I’m getting pieces from the sequence published. Maybe I should try putting it out as a scrapbook.
Aug 22, 2020 -

@artkavanagh This is so true! When I was first starting to write poetry, I read John Donne very carefully. Or, more precisely, I read the poems by John Donne that I found in anthologies very carefully. When I bought myself a copy of Donne's collected—which I no longer own, so I don't remember which version it was—I found it very difficult to read because of the apparatus. The same was true when I tried to read Alexander Pope (again, this was a long time ago, so I don't remember which edition) after first reading Hayden Carruth's essays on Pope's prosody. The apparatus was seriously distracting and turned the experience more into an intellectual exercise, if only because of the effort to ignore the apparatus, than the appreciation I had hoped it would be.
Aug 17, 2020 -

@rnv I read it along with four other books so far: Faces of Love, which includes the work of Jahan Malek Khatun, a woman from 14th century Iran; Songs of the Kisaeng, Korean courtesans from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Songs of Love And War: Afghan Women's Poetry, landays by anonymous 20th century Afghani women; The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, women of the Japanese court, writing in the 9th and 10th/11th century respectively. There is an essay to be written connecting these women poets of Asia from such disparate times, cultures, and classes. (Jahan Malek Khatun was royalty; Ho Xuan Huong was a concubine.) It might not be my essay to write, but I really think it's one worth writing.
Aug 13, 2020 -

@ayjay I know, right? Then for sure I’d be more disciplined about mine.
Aug 11, 2020 -

@rnv That’s also an interesting idea. I am, though, enjoying just letting the poetry wash over me, so to speak. It’s a different experience, but one that I’m liking.
Aug 9, 2020 -

@rnv I think I used to own Translations from The Chinese, but I don’t know what happened to it. I decided to give The Sealey Challenge a go this year. Not that I care about actually reading a whole book a day. It just seemed like it would kind of fun.
Aug 1, 2020 -

@artkavanagh @kimberlyhirsh My own experience is that the book of poems itself lets me know how to read it. There are books in which the poems demand the space and those in which the poems’ is too disrupted if I take too much time between them. I’m reading now Joumana Haddad’s Invitation to a Special Feast, which is somewhere in the middle.
Jul 31, 2020 -

@kimberlyhirsh I’ve always wanted to do this, but it always comes at the worst possible time for me. I have too much other work-related reading that I have to do and so I’m lucky if I get a book of poems in every four or five days.
Jul 30, 2020 -

@dancohen That’s marvelous!
Jul 23, 2020 -

@rnv Have you ever been to Mercer Street Books? Near NYU? The kind of used book and record store you just don’t see anymore.
Jul 21, 2020 -

@schuth The title of this album made me think of this one: The Art of Conversation, by Dave Holland and Kenny Baron.
Jul 21, 2020 -

@rnv I loved Coliseum Books. It was larger and with a wider selection than Spring Street it St. Marks, as I remember it, but it was a marvelous place to wander around.
Jul 20, 2020 -

@mwillett Bravo, sir! (From a fellow English professor.) Bravo!
Jul 14, 2020 -

@JohnPhilpin @jack I moved over to blot a little while back, two sites, and I’m really liking it. WordPress got to be too much like MS Word for me, way more features than I would ever need and too much temptation to try them nonetheless.
Jul 14, 2020 -

@artkavanagh Oh, I agree entirely with your points about the misogyny of the attacks on her, etc. Twitter being what it is, it’s not surprising at all that their voices were the loudest.

Male and female are so slippery as adjectives. On the one hand, you’re right, they connote sex (as opposed to gender), but there are other usages where that’s not so clear. So, for example, if I want to talk about my friend who is a man, trans or cis, there might be a point where I refer to him as my male friend, which does not necessarily mean that he has a penis. My own experience has been that trans folk insist that they are male or female when those terms are invoked to exclude them in terms of gender, not when they are used as biological descriptors.
Jul 12, 2020 -

@artkavanagh I’m about ten years younger than you, so by the time I was in college, while it took some conscious effort on my part, referring to women as women did not seem odd at all. But your post made me think two things: it is important to validate and not belittle the investment of women who fought that battle, because it was a real victory and it’s important to recognize that locating gender identity in sexual physiology/biology, not as personal, lived experience, but as some sort of universal truth—which is what Rowling’s post at the least implied— is heteronormative and therefore invalidating of trans identity almost by definition.
Jul 12, 2020 -

@artkavanagh I’m looking forward to reading it.
Jul 12, 2020 -

@rnv I remember when they lost their lease in the original place—because, I think, the landlord raised the rent, and there was quite a desperate campaign to keep them afloat in their second location. It was really sad when they had to close. Same thing happened to Spring Street. My memory is that St. Marks was more left/political and Spring Street was more eclectically intellectual, with some consumer-oriented flavoring.
Jul 11, 2020 -

@rnv I loved that bookstore, especially its first incarnation, before it had to move. That and the Spring Street bookstore we’re my favorites.
Jul 9, 2020 -

@grayareas I agree. That’s a well-done profile.
Jul 7, 2020 -

@artkavanagh That’s an interesting post. I think it’s important for men especially to tell these kinds of stories, where there’s more going on than simple acceptance or rejection of norms, because we are so encouraged, implicitly and explicitly, not to be reflective about gender.
Jul 5, 2020 -

@artkavanagh The link takes me to a 404 page.
Jun 15, 2020 -

@Bruce I remember when my father used to address letters to me as Master Richard Newman because I was still a boy and not yet a Mister. Now I wonder where that usage actually originated.

The question of whether the word has been so tainted by slavery that we ought not to use it is a complex one. Would it apply to the verb as well, the adjectival form, etc? I’m not trying to be pedantic, but it’s one thing to avoid it in situations where it actually conjures slavery—as in master and slave cylinders—and another to decide that this association delegitimizes other forms/usages. //@johnphilpin @simonwoods
Jun 13, 2020 -

@JohnPhilpin Just reaffirms yet one more time my decision to get off Facebook.
Jun 12, 2020 -

@help I changed the format from heic to jpg and it worked fine--I just needed to get the fix done. But all the other images, I think, are heic, so I wonder why this one didn't work.
Jun 12, 2020 -

@help That's so strange. I just uploaded it again, but there is no image there.
Jun 12, 2020 -

@help: An image that I uploaded as part of the Bookshelf Juxtapositions series that I've been posting seems to have disappeared. It should appear in this post.
Jun 9, 2020 -

@ablaze Yeah. Me too.
Jun 9, 2020 -

@ablaze That’s a lovely post, and a lovely haiku you share. I laughed out loud about your point about the Shema! My rebbes would have been horrified if I’d pointed that out.
Jun 8, 2020 -

@Bruce Nicely done!
Jun 1, 2020 -

@patrickrhone Let's try this poem again, which I have been thinking about all week, but this time with the right Markdown formatting

Poem about Police Violence
June Jordan

Tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?
sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
comes back to my mouth and I am quiet
like Olympian pools from the running
mountainous snows under the sun

sometimes thinking about the 12th House of the Cosmos
or the way your ear ensnares the tip
of my tongue or signs that I have never seen
like DANGER WOMEN WORKING

I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rapid
and repetitive affront as when they tell me
18 cops in order to subdue one man
18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle
(don't you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue
and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder
that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn
street was just a "justifiable accident" again
(Again)

People been having accidents all over the globe
so long like that I reckon that the only
suitable insurance is a gun
I'm saying war is not to understand or rerun
war is to be fought and won

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
blots it out/the bestial but
not too often tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently
Jun 1, 2020 -

@patrickrhone I’ve been thinking all week about this poem by June Jordan. It’s from her book Passion:

Poem about Police Violence June Jordan

Tell me something what you think would happen if every time they kill a black boy then we kill a cop everytime they kill a black man then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently? sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby comes back to my mouth and I am quiet like Olympian pools from the running mountainous snows under the sun

sometimes thinking about the 12th House of the Cosmos or the way your ear ensnares the tip of my tongue or signs that I have never seen like DANGER WOMEN WORKING

I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rapid and repetitive affront as when they tell me 18 cops in order to subdue one man 18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle (don't you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn street was just a "justifiable accident" again (Again)

People been having accidents all over the globe so long like that I reckon that the only suitable insurance is a gun I'm saying war is not to understand or rerun war is to be fought and won

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby blots it out/the bestial but not too often tell me something what you think would happen if everytime they kill a black boy then we kill a cop everytime they kill a black man then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently
Jun 1, 2020 -

@Ron @patrickrhone First, Patrick, thank you for sharing. It is so important to have those kinds of first person accounts, to be able to bear witness, from whatever distance, through your eyes and also to your experience.

Ron, Your comment about your wife's question made me think of my wife, who is also from another country, and conversations that she and I have had over the years. One thing I learned from her asking very similar questions to yours about “What African Americans want?” (which also included questions like "Why do they always make everything about race?”) is that it can sometimes take a long time for people from other countries--where the racial/ethnic power dynamics and the history behind those dynamics are different--fully to understand the historical, cultural, political, and socioeconomic context which anti-Black racism in the US is and which also gives that racism its particular shape.

In my wife's case--and I want to be clear that I am not trying to generalize from my wife to your wife--this has been especially true because in her own country she was among the privileged majority, in ethnic terms if not political ones, and it took her a while fully to inhabit what it means that here, in the US, she is seen as a woman of color. One difference, of course, is that the racism and xenophobia my wife experiences, offensive as it is, is not baked into the fabric of our cultural, political, and socioeconomic institutions—and law enforcement is only one of them—in the same way that anti-Black racism is.

It's not just, for example, that the killing of George Floyd by law enforcement has a history that goes back 400 years to the beginnings of slavery in this country; it's that this history is with good reason very much alive in Black communities in the United States today in a way that it is not for, say, a white guy like me, living in the relative comfort and safety of my (unfortunately) gentrifying, very diverse neighborhood in New York City. It's hard enough for all too many people who were born here--most, but not all us white--to wrap our heads around this fact (for which we can thank the impoverished way we teach the history of our own country). It can be even harder for people like my wife, who were neither born here nor grew up here, to do so, even as they fully understand the injustice of what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd.
May 30, 2020 -

@patrickrhone Thank you for this.
May 28, 2020 -

@kimberlyhirsh Depending on the discipline and location, that’s a really tough line to walk. Good luck!
May 28, 2020 -

@kimberlyhirsh That is a cool “About Me” page. I like the mix of seriousness and tongue-in-cheek so lacking in academia. And I’ll trade you. Here’s mine.
May 26, 2020 -

@tiff\_frye That is a lovely, lovely, moving post. Welcome!
May 25, 2020 -

@rnv

If you’re a cultural critic, you have one job: to range as widely and deeply as possible through human culture and send back reports of your remarkable discoveries.

Amen to that!
May 24, 2020 -

@rnv I used to have that Plath. It got lost over the years. I've been thinking lately that I should read her again.
May 24, 2020 -

@chipotle Yup! I would buy that app.
May 23, 2020 -

@rnv The bawdy tales book I bought decades ago from who knows which bookstore. The Hebrew book was a gift from my sister-in-law. An awkward attempt, which I nonetheless appreciated, at saying, “I see you.”
May 23, 2020 -

@rnv So it is kind of cool that our book posts show up one after the other on my timeline.
May 22, 2020 -

@kimberlyhirsh That is a lovely story!
May 19, 2020 -

@chet The album I have is Elements: music.apple.com/us/album/...
May 19, 2020 -

@rnv I think you'll appreciate my exchange on Twitter with my friend Ronny: twitter.com/richardjn...
May 18, 2020 -

@chet I saw him in concert in NYC. I’m blanking now on the name of the piece, but it was a marvelous show.
May 14, 2020 -

@rnv Yeah. I’m having the same experience with my “juxtapositions.” I’m impressed, though, that you know the year you bought the book. I’ve never been that well-organized.
May 14, 2020 -

@rnv Have you read the Montaigne? I have had his collected essays on my shelf for years and keep promising myself I’ll get to it.
May 11, 2020 -

@rnv I wish I could say I’ve read either of them, but it’s cool that they’re next to each other.
May 10, 2020 -

@rnv “to do something small, just for me, every day." I like that. I posted a photo earlier that I called “Interesting bookshelf juxtapositions," sort of like your random walk through your library. I've always been fascinated by which books end up next to each other because I organize my library alphabetically. Not that I think the juxtapositions mean anything necessarily, but the chain of associations they make possible is interesting, I think. It's also interesting to think about how differently I experience those juxtapositions depending on whether I've some, all, or none of the books in question.
May 9, 2020 -

@rnv I've been thinking that I owe you an email! Clicked both those links. I like the Dove exercise and the way you did it. I've never been good at those kinds of constraints, though maybe that's a reason to try. And the pencil tour is a very cool idea. It made me wonder what the analogous thing would be in my life. Something I will be chewing on. In any event, I’m glad to be blogging again and, like we talked about when you were in NY, now I can start to figure out what I want my online presence to be and how I want to structure it.
Jan 28, 2020 -

@aa Thanks so much!
Nov 29, 2019 -

@amit Thanks, Amit. Turns out that Blot was out of sync with Dropbox for a bit.
Nov 27, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks. It feels good. Like a cool drink of water after a long thirst.
Nov 26, 2019 -

@smokey @vasta This conversation couldn't come, for me, at a more apt moment. My situation at work, without going into too much detail, is this: positions of responsibility and leadership are opening up that people assume I am going to run for. (They are elected positions.) More than that, when they talk to me about them, they imply--whether intentionally or not--that they think my running is something I owe the department because the department needs me.

In some ways, and this is part of what makes the situation doubly difficult for me--because I do feel a sense of obligation to the department; I grew up there; this is my 30th year--in some ways, they are right. Because of my seniority; because I am a tenured, full professor; because of my institutional memory because I am generally well-liked and respected across campus by faculty and administrators alike, I am the logical next person to fill those roles. (Doesn't mean that others couldn't fill the position and do a fine job; just that, of the visible people, if I were looking at this from the outside, I would also be my choice.)

At the same time, though, I recently made a commitment to myself to prioritize my writing. I have applied for a fellowship that, if I get it, will take me away from the campus for a year--precisely the year when I would have to run for this position; I have applied for other opportunities as well, each of which would be potentially compromised by that position, were I to be elected (as I probably would be).

Originally, the way things seemed to be arranging themselves, the question of running or not running would not present itself until the 21-22 academic year, which would have fit very nicely with my plans. Now, circumstances have changed, and I will have to make the choice in the spring of this academic year about whether to run. My term would start in Fall 2020. So I have been thinking quite a about the question of what we owe to others. Not that this conversation has resolved anything for me, but thanks for further goading my thoughts.
Nov 17, 2019 -

@SusanB That is so very true!
Nov 3, 2019 -

@rnv That works for me!
Oct 29, 2019 -

@vasta I’ll be interested to see the edited version, if you’re inclined to share.
Oct 29, 2019 -

@vasta Lovely. I like the way it can be read both as if the rock is imparting well-earned and difficult wisdom and as if it’s (l)earning that wisdom in the course of the poem.
Oct 19, 2019 -

@ryanboren That’s a really thought-provoking review. Makes me want to read the book and dig deeper into the whole subject. Thanks!
Oct 11, 2019 -

@dancohen Thanks for this. It is an interesting idea.
Oct 11, 2019 -

@richardleis @rnv This has always been an interesting question for me. I have been tempted to memorize some of my poems, following the same logic, but I've never actually done it because I know I would not put the time into rehearsing them--the way singers rehearse songs--so that the recitation would become an actual performance (if that distinction makes sense). Over time, I've found that I actually prefer not memorizing them because it means I come to them more or less fresh each time I read them. I do read them aloud several times, and sometimes more than several times, before a reading to re-familiarize myself with how they move and so I don’t stumble, etc. while I’m reading, and I have found that this allows me to find new things in them each time I read.

That said, I think Robert's advice for how to memorize the poems is spot on. Break a leg!
Oct 7, 2019 -

@artkavanagh @smokey That is very useful to know! Thank you.
Oct 7, 2019 -

@artkavanagh @smokey Sadly, you’re speaking a language I don’t understand. I’m assuming this means there are characters I could’ve used to produce the correct formatting, but beyond that, I haven’t a clue.
Oct 5, 2019 -

@artkavanagh In the poetry world, the problem is that book reviews have become more like cheerleading than anything else. Or they simply summarize content, with a few illustrative excerpts, and blandly assert the book is worth reading because the poet has tried “to do something.” There is precious little critical engagement with the vision of the book, with craft, and there is almost no such thing as a negative review anymore.
Oct 5, 2019 -

@chet Hah! That is just so spot on.
Sep 30, 2019 -

@richnewman I can’t find the takes-a-now emoji, so just “Thanks!”
Sep 29, 2019 -

@smokey There's a poem in those vignettes.
Sep 29, 2019 -

@schuth I have that same case. It really is a good one.
Sep 18, 2019 -

@richardleis Congratulations!
Sep 17, 2019 -

@IAmJamesHall You might try Frank O’Hara or Langston Hughes. Sharon Olds is also worth reading. Another way to go might be to check out Rita Dove’s 20th century American poetry anthology, put out by Penguin. (I just realized that I am assuming you’re from the States, not sure why. If you’re not, there are similar anthologies for other Anglophone poetries.)
Sep 17, 2019 -

@IAmJamesHall Well, reading and memorizing is one if the best ways to learn. Do you read free verse as well?
Sep 17, 2019 -

@Virginia “Soft skills?” Is that like soft power?
Sep 16, 2019 -

@Virginia So I can’t help but ask: What’s the book about?
Sep 16, 2019 -

@IAmJamesHall You handle parts of that form really well! Reading it made me wonder which poets you read.
Sep 10, 2019 -

@rnv See you when you get back. Hope all is well.
Aug 31, 2019 -

@solari That is well said and true.
Aug 31, 2019 -

@vasta @blot Yeah. I have thought the same thing, but I also use Scrivener, which syncs through Dropbox, and iCloud would not help me with some stuff I need to be able to do at school.
Aug 28, 2019 -

@vasta @grayareas @Blot I was wondering the same thing when I read this conversation. I still rely pretty heavily on Dropbox for work and other uses, but it's always worth knowing about alternatives.
Aug 28, 2019 -

@rnv Maybe you should write for Law & Order.
Aug 21, 2019 -

@Blot Up and running. Thanks!
Aug 21, 2019 -

@vasta @rnv Me too
Aug 18, 2019 -

@smokey It’s a pretty remarkable book, actually. Been on my shelf for a long time.
Aug 16, 2019 -

@ayjay Where is it? I remember when I lived in Korea in the 1980s, how shocked I was to see that symbol prominently displayed on Buddhist temples. Took a while to get used to.
Aug 16, 2019 -

@artkavanagh Good thing you’ve never met my students.
Aug 14, 2019 -

@rnv That's a devastatingly accurate take. I just got the notice that there will be an active shooter drill in the library at the college where I teach. I was either off campus or at another obligatory meeting when the drill happened in the building where my office is, that houses the department I work in. It is truly sobering and more than a little frightening. There is no way to lock the entire campus down in the way that one can lock down a single school building. This is not to suggest that the situation on my campus is somehow worse, but it constantly gives me pause that we are an open campus and have no way of monitoring, much less controlling, who comes on campus, through which entrance, at any given moment.
Aug 10, 2019 -

@JohnPhilpin And now I’ve read in The NY Times that he was somehow not on suicide watch. @joehoffman
Aug 10, 2019 -

@JohnPhilpin I had the same question. I do hope this doesn’t put an end to the investigation, though.
Aug 10, 2019 -

@rnv The Triggering Town was actually very important to me early on, though I barely remember it now. And I remember liking Hugo’s work as well. Whether I would have the same response now or not, I don’t know. I just loved Carruth’s piece for its blunt honesty and week-honed precision.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Whitman, just based on the work. I never knew enough about him biographically. Some was clearly self-important pomposity, but some I thought absolutely gorgeous.
Aug 9, 2019 -

@rnv Speaking of, have seen this piece in The National Review about Whitman? There's also a review of Richard Hugo in one of Hayden Carruth's book of essays...I just don't remember which one, and I don't think it's online.
Aug 9, 2019 -

@rnv So now I’m curious whose work you didn’t like so much, though I will understand if you don’t want to name them publicly.
Jul 29, 2019 -

@rnv Is that yours, or have I seen it somewhere before?
Jul 27, 2019 -

@rnv Oh, I know. It's just the feeling I get when I realize there's another whole circle with which I could increase that overlap. There's just too much to read.
Jul 27, 2019 -

@rnv And now I feel so very poorly read. Not that I thought I’d invented something new, but I don’t know their work at all—though I’ve heard of all of them, of course.
Jul 26, 2019 -

@solari Yeah, I’ve had it on my shelf almost since it was published, but the circumstances of my reading life unfortunately make it nearly impossible for me to read books when I get them, unless they are for teaching or something school-related. I am playing catchup with books I bought a decade and more ago.
Jul 25, 2019 -

@JohnPhilpin That's marvelous! I don't have my own writing business anymore, but I would have loved to be able to use that somehow when I did.
Jul 23, 2019 -

@lmullen Those are really good! She has some real talent.
Jul 23, 2019 -

@vasta I like that model as well. I ran a modified version of that for a local poetry organization. People hadn’t read the poet’s work beforehand, necessarily, but I made room during the reading, in between poems, for questions and conversation, so that the poet often didn’t get through her or his “set list.” It was interesting to see where the conversations about the poems took us, especially when they went off in non-literary directions. That’s hard to do, though, with a standard reading. I’m wondering how to give that kind of control/authority/whatever to a more conventional kind of audience.
Jul 21, 2019 -

@rnv I learned a lot from reading Levine about narrative poetry. Him and also Ai, whose collected I bought a while back. I used to own four or five of her books, but they were among those that fell away over the years of moving. I'm looking forward to reading her again when I have the chance.
Jul 21, 2019 -

@rnv I loved What Work Is. I’ve never read Tom Clark. I just finished reading Jazz Moon, by Joe Okonkwo. It’s a novel, but it’s about a poet: a gay African American poet coming to terms with himself and his sexuality in 1920s Harlem and Paris. It’s really well done, and I like the way Okonkwo captures the relationship between the main character’s art and the process of coming to terms with himself.
Jul 19, 2019 -

@rnv This made me smile.
Jul 19, 2019 -

@rnv So true! And so important to remember.
Jul 19, 2019 -

@smokey Yeah, I have colleagues who lost the place we work using the state university affiliation and omitting the words “community college” because there is a bias against faculty that we are somehow intellectually and scholastically second rate. This was even true in AWP among creative writers—where my own bias would assume there would be less of that sort of snobbery—for a very long time. This is less true since the association’s two-year-college caucus formed to address that issue, but we are still considered a “lesser” subgroup when compared to our four-year or research one colleagues.
Jul 19, 2019 -

@wilsongis I’d like to think that’s true. I wonder if there are any studies to that effect. //@smokey
Jul 18, 2019 -

@Bruce That is very cool! Thanks!
Jul 18, 2019 -

@artkavanagh I once tried the same sort of thing, but I gave up for much the same reason. Part of my own dissatisfaction comes from just not liking what it feels like to read the journals on my desktop or phone. I am hoping, though, that reading the journals on my new iPad will prove more comfortable as an experience and therefore more sustainable as a habit.
Jul 18, 2019 -

@Bruce Thanks, that makes sense, but I realized, after reading your response, and also a response that I got on Twitter, that I asked my question imprecisely. What I'm really interested in thinking about is what would happen if the audience, rather than the reader, were more in control of the reading. Like, what would happen if the audience somehow got to choose which poems the reader would read--because I am thinking specifically about poetry readings for the moment? What would that mechanism look like? How might it change--how might it be used to change--the dynamic not just of the reading itself, but also of any conversation that took place afterwards (or even during)? Part of why I am asking this question is connected to my classroom pedagogy, where I like to create assignments that give a fair amount of control to the students, and I was wondering the other day about how I might bring some of that to the reading series I run.
Jul 17, 2019 -

@artkavanagh I have been looking for a way to read journals online and have not found anything that feels comfortable.
Jul 16, 2019 -

@the That used to be the base of a lamp. It’s probably 20 years old. When the lamp went the way of the world, my wife suggested I use the base as a coaster—hence the stains. The hole where the lamp base used to go in also happens to be the right size for my pen. (Which is the only fancy pen I own. My father bought it for me after we reconnected after 10 years of not talking. He has no idea what to make of who I am as a writer, and we’re almost back to not talking, but it feels good to use the pen nonetheless.)
Jul 16, 2019 -

@smokey So finding this ending turned out to be easier than I thought, once I accomplished what my wife calls "breaking the damn." I found that one spot where some new language could enter what I was thinking and whatever was blocking me opened up. I am sure I will rewrite it at least twice before I am done, but it has the shape I want the conclusion to have. Finally!
Jul 16, 2019 -

@chet That sounds like a really worthwhile project. If my life had been different--basically if I'd married a different woman--I might have ended up a stay-at-home dad; but because of her circumstances (not bad, just life), I needed to be the one to work full-time.
Jul 16, 2019 -

@gebloom I generally experience the academic version of this kind of thing, which takes different forms, but is no less, shall we say, troubling.
Jul 16, 2019 -

@rnv First, thanks for the kind words! And, can I tell you, I groaned out loud at the end of that story. //@Bruce
Jul 16, 2019 -

@dancohen That is so cool! I need to take a closer look.
Jul 13, 2019 -

@chet That is a milestone! Good for you. What’s the book about?
Jul 12, 2019 -

@gebloom True enough, but this is more like searching for the ending of a poem or story and part of what makes it frustrating is that it feels like it’s right at the tips of my fingers and then keeps slipping away.
Jul 11, 2019 -

@smokey Yeah. I am struggling with the ending of 13,000+ word creative nonfiction piece. I think I am getting there, but it is turning into a prime example of writing to learn/figure out what you do and don't know <i>and</i> how you feel about it; and so it's taking longer than I want it to, and it's just a mess. It doesn't help that I need at least a workable draft before I can start thinking about putting the finishing touches on the manuscript it's a part of: a mixed genre book (poetry and essays). I want to get it done by the end of the month. For my own scheduling purposes and because I have publisher willing to read it.
Jul 7, 2019 -

@rnv This made me nostalgic, not just for other blogs, but for my own as well. Reminds me why I’ve been rethinking my online presence as a whole.
Jul 6, 2019 -

@cygnoir Congratulations!
Jun 24, 2019 -

@artkavanagh That's a great story. Thanks for sharing it.
Jun 16, 2019 -

@smokey And then, of course, the challenge is in figuring out how to act on that truth. I like what the article says, but, for myself, I’m still trying to figure it out, especially as a teacher.
May 19, 2019 -

@artkavanagh Very interesting. I’ve saved it for a closer reading.
May 19, 2019 -

@rnv Those are really good hot takes. I’m going to have try my hand. Brevity has rarely been my strong suit.
May 19, 2019 -

@rnv What did you think of Bright Dead Things? I liked a lot of it and thought some of it was extraordinary.
May 18, 2019 -

@rnv 100 words sounds about right. I’ve been writing reviews for American Book Review this year and last year. So far I’ve done three. They’ve asked for 1000 words or so each time. I’ve enjoyed it, and I’ve enjoyed saying plainly what I think—Hayden Carruth is my model there—but it would be interesting to try to do that within a 100 word or so limitation.
May 17, 2019 -

@mwillett That’s a great assignment! I’ve marked the Chronicles article to read later. I haven’t taught composition in a while, but I’ve been fiddling around with how to do something similar in the creative writing classes I teach. Thanks for spurring further thought.
May 16, 2019 -

@rnv I don’t know why I just saw this now, but a “hot take” would be lovely.
May 16, 2019 -

@smokey All too true.
Apr 29, 2019 -

@rnv Still, you’re being more disciplined about this than I. And I appreciate learning the names of poets I don’t know.
Apr 28, 2019 -

@rnv I don’t know any of those, I don’t think. My reading has fallen off the shelf—pardon that pun. I’ve just got too much to do at school. Can’t wait till I don’t have to read student papers, colleague’s memos/emails, or reports from the administration for a couple of weeks. But good for you! If those are all book length, that’s truly impressive.
Apr 11, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks. Sadly, my sisters’ estrangement from each other and from the family, small as it is—it’s only me and my mother now—has only increased. It’s an odd feeling, sad, but more than sad in a way I can’t yet articulate, to think that when my mother dies, I will be alone in that way. I do miss my grandmother.
Apr 7, 2019 -

@grayareas That is absolutely fascinating!
Apr 6, 2019 -

@kerim check out the Cullman Felliwship at the New York Public Library. The call for next season isn’t up yet, though.
Mar 18, 2019 -

@richnewman That is a great quote from John Cage! Worth remembering and taking very seriously. You're right, of course, that what matters is taking the assignment seriously and not worrying so much about getting it done. (Where does "Process is all..." come from?) Also, it looks like you've got a really interesting list to get through. I'm going to have to look more closely and decide what's worth adding to mine.
Mar 17, 2019 -

@rnv I am a little bit in awe of that list--not just the discipline it took to get all that reading done, but also the discipline of remembering to track it. I am making very slow progress--and I keep forgetting to track it--largely because of things like the union blog post I am now procrastinating instead of writing: explaining some of the ins and outs of the NY State budget process as it relates to higher education. It's interesting in itself, and I end up learning things when I write these kinds of blogs posts, but I'd much rather be reading or writing or thinking about, or going somewhere to support, poets and poetry.
Mar 17, 2019 -

@dswanson That's a gorgeous shot! Are you in Queens now?
Mar 16, 2019 -

@Miraz Here! Here. That's a lovely image and it deserves a lot more attention than the one in The Guardian.
Mar 11, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks. Now that I’m back in the classroom, time is in short supply.
Mar 5, 2019 -

@smokey That kind of grade inflation is actually kind of shameful, but if it’s from a college I wonder if the school is accredited and what happens if students try to transfer credits.
Mar 1, 2019 -

@schuth @smokey @rnv Thanks all! I will celebrate a little bit, but now I also have to turn to all the work I let slide while I stole time to finish this. I am going to take tonight off, though.
Feb 25, 2019 -

@academicdave I’m guessing that would be a first. The wind is not quite that bad where I am, but I was watching the branches on the trees between buildings as I walked to class.
Feb 24, 2019 -

@jamesdasher @garciabuxton @arush @macgenie @ronguest @odd @joshuapsteele When I was a yeshiva student in my teens, we were told that, yes, you could fulfill the obligation to drink four cups of wine on Passover with grape juice. I think, if I remember correctly, it’s the grapes that are important, not the wine part. The blessing you say before drinking wine thanks God for “creating the fruit of the vine,” not for creating wine.
Feb 24, 2019 -

@dgold Thanks for posting this.
Feb 24, 2019 -

@vanessa That’s lovely.
Feb 23, 2019 -

@ayjay That's a thoughtful and thought-provoking post. I have been ruminating for the past few weeks about my own newsletter, which you can find here. Not too long ago, after I joined Micro.blog, I deleted my Facebook account, along with all my other social media accounts (except Twitter), and I have been sitting quietly, and patiently, with the question not just of what I want my online presence to be, but how I want both to connect with people through that presence, as well as to connect people to it (so that they can, for example, learn more about my work as a writer). These seem to me related but different kinds of connections. Or maybe I am just making something that is relatively simple more complicated than it needs to be--a bad habit of mine. I too am more interested in what you call "stock replenishment," but what I am hung up on right now is thinking about process. I feel like I am too scattered. I have my own website, Micro.blog, my newsletter, and I am a moderator/contributor on a blog called Alas. I want to find a way to bring those different things into some sort of coherent relationship with one another. Not being able to think my way through that is making it hard to put out the next issue of my newsletter. Or maybe I've just found what it should be about.
Feb 23, 2019 -

@kerim Sadly that is not surprising. I’ve been following this situation in China mostly in my peripheral vision (for practical reasons), but it is very disturbing.
Feb 23, 2019 -

@kerim This is a thought-provoking piece. I especially liked the conclusion:

The job of the scholar, in other words, is to resist the tyranny of the now. That requires something different than knowledge of the past; indeed, historians have proven all too useful to the Historovox, which is constantly looking for academic warrants to say what its denizens always and already believe. No, the job of the scholar is to recall and retrieve what the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin described as “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present.” The task is not to provide useful knowledge to the present; it is to insist on, to keep a record of, the most seemingly useless counter-knowledge from the past — for the sake of an as-yet-to-be imagined future.
Feb 19, 2019 -

@rnv I agree. Also, I saw you sent me an email. I will respond when I get back from the trip I’m on now.
Feb 19, 2019 -

@schuth Intersting. I’m thinking of getting a new iPad with pen so I can grade papers digitally, but the weight does matter to me. I’ll have to check it out.
Feb 17, 2019 -

@smokey I appreciate that. If I decide to submit them, though, any of the ones I’ve posted, I may need to take them down. Or maybe I’ll pick a point and submit moving forward. I need to keep pondering.
Feb 17, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks! I’ve been struggling lately with the tension between posting these here and submitting them to journals, since I think some of them are publishable. I’m wondering if I’ll end up with a chapbook’s worth. It’s an interesting project that n this regard.
Feb 16, 2019 -

@JoeHoffman I liked that pun too.
Feb 14, 2019 -

@richnewman So people I respect have pointed out that it’s necessary to read this with a healthy dose of skepticism, not least because no one has (yet?) been able to find the campaign statements the author references. Still, I do think it’s worth reading.
Feb 14, 2019 -

@smokey We’re at the airport and it just occurred to me to wish my wife Happy Valentines Day. We laughed. She hadn’t been paying attention either. After 25 years, it’s not quite the occasion it used to be.
Feb 14, 2019 -

@grayareas And it’s about time, too! As a union secretary, I find this news heartening.
Feb 14, 2019 -

@Annie Well done! The distinction is a crucial one and the strategies you suggest are spot on. While I don’t often have haters in the workshops I lead, the way I run the workshops is largely informed by the ideas you lay out in this post. Part of what my students are learning is how to be a good, constructive critic.
Feb 10, 2019 -

@smokey @macgenie @bennorris

and “being good stewards of ourselves” is such an important point to make in this era.

Yes, yes, and yes!
Feb 8, 2019 -

@patrickrhone Thank you for posting this. I will finish it later but what I’ve read so far was definitely something I needed to read today.
Feb 7, 2019 -

@cheri Thanks for posting this!
Feb 4, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks. I do too.
Feb 4, 2019 -

@smokey I had not thought of that at all, but now that you point it out, I think you’re right. When I wrote the original poems these came from, I very pointedly tried to avoid topicality. It’s interesting how it snuck in anyway.
Jan 29, 2019 -

@schuth Just FYI: the subscription will come from The Nassau Community College Federation of Teachers.
Jan 28, 2019 -

@schuth I passed this on to the ESL institute at my school.
Jan 28, 2019 -

@schuth Thank you!
Jan 28, 2019 -

@rnv Thanks for that link! I’m really looking forward to moving through the anthology slowly and thoughtfully. There are so many poets in there that I’ve not read and not heard of.
Jan 28, 2019 -

@schuth Thanks! Is there a subscription firm on the site? I couldn’t find it.
Jan 27, 2019 -

@schuth (Are you William or Bill? I just realized I don't know.) A heads up that I just sent an email to DWP. I'm secretary of the faculty union at the college where I teach and we'd like to have a subscription delivered to the veteran's house on our campus. Is that possible?
Jan 27, 2019 -

@smokey I do need to make a decision, though. I'm beginning to see these "Lines Left..." pieces as a chapbook or a section of a full-length collection.
Jan 27, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks! And thanks for your kind words about the others. I am behind on responding to people. I've been prepping for classes and dealing with union issues--I'm secretary of my faculty union. I'm just happy I've been able to post as relatively consistently as I've been doing.
Jan 25, 2019 -

@ChrisJWilson My cat has almost the same face, though this picture doesn't show it as clearly.
Jan 23, 2019 -

@ayjay I so, so, so agree. I'm not a journalist, but I tried exactly once to enter a Twitter debate--over Junot Díaz--and I was immediately sorry I did so.
Jan 23, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks. I think I like “beneath your tongue” better than “on your tongue,” though. Or maybe “in” so the double meaning of tongue gets more obviously foregroubded.
Jan 22, 2019 -

@smokey Ooh! Looking forward to seeing it.
Jan 21, 2019 -

@schuth Thanks for this! A useful list.
Jan 20, 2019 -

@rnv I'm glad.
Jan 20, 2019 -

@kerim It's one the best I've read since an essay by June Jordan, the title of which I can't now remember but which I read at least 20 years ago (maybe: And the Blood Shall Be A Sign Unto You, or someting like that). I will have to look up the reference when I get the chance.
Jan 20, 2019 -

@schuth That's great! A first book is such a big deal. I hope it gets the kind of treatment (from the publisher) and attention (from readers and critics) that will fulfill you as a writer.
Jan 20, 2019 -

@schuth That's always, for me anyway, such an exciting period, when you can feel the collection coming together and pieces you weren't sure about start clicking with finality into place or revealing themselves as not a part of this particular book. (I'm in that part of the process now on my own project.) Is this your first book?
Jan 20, 2019 -

@kerim Thank for this! It’s one of the clearest and most cogent statements I’ve read.
Jan 20, 2019 -

@juliansummerhayes Those are lovely shots.
Jan 19, 2019 -

@TheDimPause That is just so perfect!
Jan 18, 2019 -

@garciabuxton A pleasure.
Jan 18, 2019 -

@garciabuxton @schuth @vasta @rnv "Singapore" is the Mary Olive poem I taught this semester in my creative writing class. It's a powerful piece.
Jan 18, 2019 -

@garciabuxton I think American Primitive is where I started, but I tend to think you could start anywhere and then, as William suggests, move backwards or forwards, as the mood strikes you. She's certainly got a rich enough body of work out there.

//@schuth @vasta @rnv
Jan 17, 2019 -

@vasta I hadn’t read her in many years, but then some of my students last semester fell in love with her work, and I got reconnected. I thought I still had her books on my shelf, but they, sadly are among those that fell away over years of moving. I’ll need to get one. I’ll also have to check out the On Being interview.

@garciabuxton @schuth
Jan 17, 2019 -

@academicdave That's an absolutely gorgeous picture!
Jan 17, 2019 -

@smokey Again, thanks!
Jan 17, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks. I took that in the Dominican Republic a couple of summers ago.
Jan 15, 2019 -

@macgenie

The company has not proven themselves worthy as the steward of what I treasure most: my relationships.

This so succinctly articulates one of the central reasons I deleted my Facebook account that I wish I had written it. Still finding my war around Micro.blog, but I am much happier here, and one way I know that is that I am enjoying the process itself more than I ever did on social media.
Jan 15, 2019 -

@fsteeg Thanks for this! This is a fascinating idea.
Jan 15, 2019 -

@rnv Another thought about this:

If you learn to work the raw materials, you’ll be better prepared for when you are inspired. And you may eventually discover that the joy of working the raw materials is enough.

The "Lines Left on The Cutting Room Floor" that I've been posting here are all from a series of very traditional sonnets I forced myself to write. I ended up with around 120 of them. When I went back to work on them to see if there was anything there other than practice, only one of them survived as a sonnet, but I would not trade the sheer pleasure I felt in writing them all for anything.

cc/ @ddykstal @schuth @mwillett @smokey
Jan 15, 2019 -

@schuth @schuth Are you cribbing from The Triggering Town? That was a really important book to me when I was younger and I've been thinking lately that it would be good to get a copy and read again.

// @ddykstal @mwillett @smokey @rnv
Jan 15, 2019 -

@macgenie I had the pleasure, and honor, of working with the Rumi scholar John Moyne as a co-translator of the verse in his A Bird in The Garden of Angels. It was a remarkable experience. It's lovely to see Rumi quoted on Micro.blog.
Jan 14, 2019 -

@JoeHoffman That’s an interesting question. Surveillance regimes will have been different at different time periods and imagine that what is worth surveillance will also be different, depending. For me, though, the small town gossip is fundamentally different from what Metres is talking about—if I’ve understood what you’re talking about correctly. And the difference has largely to do with scope, institutionalization, and accountability. The small town gossip could be held accountable in ways Facebook, for example, cannot. Or do you mean something different?
Jan 14, 2019 -

@juliansummerhayes Yeah, someone should shut that guy up!
Jan 13, 2019 -

@rnv This:

No one thinks they can simply be inspired to write a song and, never having played before, just pick up a guitar and boom: a song. So why would writing be any different? Well, I believe it’s because we think we’re practicing all the time, by virtue of using language to, well, talk.

Reminds me very much of something the Australian poet A. D. Hope said at the beginning of an essay called "The Three Faces of Love," of which I unfortunately cannot find a copy online, or I would quote it for you. Basically, he suggests that what you say above is one reason why, in his time at least, no one gave much thought at all to the education of poets: since we are, all of us, experts (in that we speak it fluently) in our native language, there is no obvious reason why any of us shouldn't think we are therefore already “qualified" to be a poet. (That's my paraphrase and might be a little inaccurate, but I think it gets at the gist.)

Of course, now, with the proliferation of MFA programs, at least in the US, his claim no longer holds. There are an awful lot of people thinking an awful lot about how to educate poets (much less other kinds of writers), and this professionalization of what it means to be a poet has had all kinds of consequences, but that is for another conversation.

cc/ @ddykstal @schuth @mwillett @smokey
Jan 13, 2019 -

@juliansummerhayes That’s a provocative statement. How do you understand the first part, “Resistance is always lying”?
Jan 13, 2019 -

@smokey That's interesting. One of the things I thought about while writing that work-flow-life post was an assignment that used to be pretty common, I think, among a certain group of college composition teachers, which was to write an autobiographical portrait of yourself as a writer. I never gave the assignment (though now that I'm remembering it, I might), nor was I ever given the assignment--it became fashionable after I graduated--but I do remember people talking about how so many of the stories were similar. I don't remember much more than that, but it's interesting to think about writing as a cultural activity into which people are initiated, that there are rites of passage, ebbs and flows of activities, etc. that follow certains kinds of cultural norms/narratives. I'm not trying to shoehorn your experience--of writing of reading my post--into this kind analysis. It's just what this comment of yours made me think.
Jan 12, 2019 -

@smokey Yeah, I'm excited to go back and see which posts I can recover and which ones I think are worth putting back up on my blog.
Jan 12, 2019 -

@ddykstal There was a time when the ability to write a competent sonnet was part of what an educated gentleman was supposed to be able to do. The only way to be able to do that, of course, was to learn the craft of sonnet-writing. (There were, of course, also women who could write competent and better-than-competent sonnets, but it was not considered a "necessary component" of their education.)

So, yes, there is a craft that you can learn--what some people would refer to as versification (and I would include the writing of competent free verse and prose poetry in that as well). This, for me at least, is a question separate and apart from the question of why you might choose to write poetry and for whom. Or, to put that another way, from the question of what you have (or think you have to say), whether it is best said in a poem, and to whom you think it is worth saying. There is a difference, for example, between the person who writes poetry primarily for themselves and/or for a small group and the person who has the audacity--because it is, at bottom, an audacious thing--to presume that their work is worth the time, effort, and money other people would have to expend publishing, promoting, and reading it. And that difference has nothing whatsoever to do with the lasting literary value of the work produced by those two kinds of poets. The former might write "poetry for the ages," while the the latter's work might have no lasting value at all. (And none of that takes into consideration the viscissitudes of the market and the machinery by which literary reputations are made, unmade, and, for whatever reason, not made.)

I just finished listening to the latest episide of Commonplace, a worthwhile literary podcast, and the host, Rachel Zucker, was talking about how, when she was getting her MFA, she was told in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that she ought to be trying to write "timeless poetry," when what she wanted was to write "timely poetry," poetry that would be of real use to people right now. I received the same message, though I don't have an MFA, and one of the underlying assumptions is that people who succeed in writing "timeless poetry" were the ones with real, true, native talent and artistic sensibility, whilel the ones who wrote timely (which is also called occasional) poetry tended to be mere versifiers, people who may have mastered craft, but who had no innate vision or talent. For what it's worth, I think it's a bullshit distinction.

cc/ @schuth @mwillett @smokey @rnvo
Jan 10, 2019 -

@macgenie @Annie I thought The Yiddish Policeman's Union was great. I laughed out loud at parts because some of the characters and things they said/did reminded me of people I knew when I was in yeshiva. I haven't read anything else by him, though.
Jan 10, 2019 -

@juliansummerhayes Thank you for this. Just what I was looking for.
Jan 10, 2019 -

So, last night was the first time I'd ever done a reading that included my translations and my own work, both published and in progress. I built the reading around the theme of love, and it worked really well. I would not have thought that the Sufi poetry about ecstatic love that I have co-translated would go so well with my own love poetry.
Jan 10, 2019 -

@Annie I hope my students feel the same way. I’ve had some success with The Arabian Nights in the past. Students get drawn into the narrative energy of the nested stories.
Jan 9, 2019 -

@Annie There's so much to like about Frost's work, especially the darker poems. Too often, I think he forces things into the wise New England farmer vein that people came to expect of him. Today, I’ll be diving into The Arabian Nights, Haddawy's translation, for course I’m prepping.
Jan 9, 2019 -

@Annie There are five on my shelf right now, four of them anthologies:

-The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry, edited by Rita Dove, which I am, finally, almost finished with
-Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000, edited by Jon Cook
-Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women, edited by Charles Adès Fishman & Smita Sahay
-Male Lust, edited by Kerwin Kay, Jill Nagle, and Baruch Gold
-The War on Science, by Shawn Otto
Jan 9, 2019 -

@smokey I always forget about that, so thanks! I just checked and, yes, the posts are there and it turns out there’s an inaccuracy in the post on my blog. I started blogging in 2004, before I started I discovered Alas. So this year is actually my 15th blogging anniversary.

Again, thanks for reminding me about the wayback machine. As I was browsing, there are definitely posts I want to save.
Jan 9, 2019 -

@rnv He sounds interesting. I've put him on my list. Thanks.
Jan 9, 2019 -

@juliansummerhayes Thanks so much for the interest! Not sure if you're interested in getting one of my books or just checking my work out on the web--both of which are fine, of course.

My latest book is Words For What Those Men Have Done, which I would encourage you to buy directly from the publisher, since I think it's important to support small presses and/or independent bookstores over and above Amazon and the like. You can also read some sample poems from the book by clicking on the link on the book's page on my website.

If you're more interested in checking out my work online, there's a more comprehensive selection here.
Jan 8, 2019 -

@smokey @rnv So that would be the PhD dissertation exploring “the Forgotten Life of Philbert X. Dudley, Keeper of Military Toilet Specifications for the 103rd Division,” right?
Jan 8, 2019 -

@juliansummerhayes Oh, and in case it wasn’t clear, that was a lovely post.
Jan 8, 2019 -

@juliansummerhayes For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s ever too late. I didn’t publish my first book till I was 42 (translation) and my first book of poetry didn’t come out till I was 44, which is later than most poets. Now, with a total of six books published and another in the works, I can honestly say I have a writing career, not a money-making one, but a career nonetheless, something I never thought would happen when I was in my 30s.
Jan 7, 2019 -

@rnv I really like that title, Wheel with a Single Spoke. Just wondering based on the poet's name: is it a translation?
Jan 7, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks for this. I'm still poking around and getting used to the rhythm of this place. I'll start making my own recommendations soon enough.
Jan 7, 2019 -

@rnv Thanks for catching that incorrect link. Here's the correct one for Underlife; and here's a link to an essay about the controversy surrounding Dove's anthology. I don't have links handy to the Vendler and Perloff reviews that Evie Shockley talks about there, though I think she links to them. I tend to agree with Shockley's perspective, not just about how race plays into this all, but also about her assertion that the anthology--unlike Norton and other similar colllections--is more for poets than for scholars. I've used it in the poetry workshop I teach as part of our AA in creative writing, and it works like charm, in a way that those other anthologies would not.

I've read both Harél's and O'Neil's books, but, to be honest, I don't remember them well enough to say more than that I liked them. I will need to reread them in order to teach them, so I will try to remember to come back and post something more substantive then.
Jan 7, 2019 -

@rnv I should start doing that--writing the purchase date.
Jan 7, 2019 -

@rnv That's funny! Here's your first answer: An assessment tool intended to make grading more transparent.
Jan 7, 2019 -

@rnv That's true. I feel the same way. Three of the books I'll be reading for my classes: Go Because I Love You, by Jared Harél, Stanley's Girl, by Susan Eisenberg, and Underlife, by January Gill O'Neil. And that's not counting the ones I'm in the middle that I'm reading just for myself. I'm about done with Rita Dove's 20th Century Poetry Anthology, and there are at least three other books in my pile. Oy!
Jan 7, 2019 -

@rnv I’ll second that! I found his blog last week.
Jan 6, 2019 -

@rnv That's an ambition I wish I could match! I also have three piles of books-to-read, not all, but mostly poetry. I wonder if we have any overlap. It might be interesting to read at the same time, assuming my own reading schedule--which is largely dictated by my teaching and therefore includes paper grading, memos, and other non-literary material—allows.
Jan 6, 2019 -

@dhe This is a really interesting case. There is truth to the claim that people of color come under more scrutiny in situations like this, and I imagine this guy—because, as he says, his name is Mehdi—will have an even harder time demonstrating the sincerity and authenticity of his apology and his chance (assuming it is both sincere and authentic). I was not convinced by his assertions, at least as quoted in the article, that he just can't be antisemitic, but you also don't want to assume that people can't and/or won’t change.
Jan 6, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks. I wasn’t necessarily thinking I needed "reply all,” just wanting to make sure I hadn't missed something that was already there. The auto-fill for @-mentions, which I discovered on my own just before I read your reply does make this easier, and Manton's reasoning kind of makes sense, at least for now, but suppose, for example, a group of people wanted to engage in the poem exchange/discussion that @juliansummerhayes suggested in this conversation. If that group grew to be large enough, even the auto-fill would become unwieldy. Or maybe those kinds of groups wouldn’t really fit in to Micro.blog--and that, too, makes a kind of sense to me.
Jan 6, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks! He was great.
Jan 6, 2019 -

@dancohen Congratulations! She's adorable. My mother runs a dog rescue and it just makes me smile whenever people get their dogs from rescues. There are so many great dogs waiting for new homes.
Jan 6, 2019 -

@juliansummerhayes @smokey A Micro.blog poetry discussion sounds like a really wonderful idea.
Jan 5, 2019 -

@schuth My memory is that you have a choice: html or JSON.
Jan 5, 2019 -

@schuth If you download your Facebook content, won’t you have those as well? I think the archive utility creates html files of all comments, posts, etc. Couldn’t you then post them elsewhere? (Full disclosure: I’ve downloaded all my FB data in anticipation of deleting my account tonight, but haven’t yet dug into what I downloaded to see what’s there and what I can do with it.)
Jan 5, 2019 -

@donmacdonald That’s marvelous! One thing I will not miss about Facebook are posts just like that one.
Jan 5, 2019 -

@smokey I've actually been pleasantly surprised by what the YouTube algorithm shows me in terms of older songs. I don't go there to discover new and interesting things, but I really like that it shows me a lot of different live performances of songs that I have loved for a very long time.

On another, unrelated note, I realize that the conversation about roller skating rinks has split into a couple of different branches: Is there hidden somewhere a "reply all" function on Micro.blog when there are more than one person in a conversation, or do you have to type in the @ for each person you want to include?
Jan 5, 2019 -

@dhe Thanks for the kind words. I don't mind cross posting so much because I know I have different readers on different platforms. So, for example, I've been blogging at, and a moderator of, Alas, A Blog for (I think) more than 10 years now, and while I don't post everything I put up on my blog over there, I do tend to post what goes up on Alas over at my blog as well. Adding Micro.blog to the mix might make things a little messy at first, but I am interested to see what possibilities it offers.
Jan 5, 2019 -

@smokey Those kinds of groups can be such community-building experiences. One of the things that's been so gratifying about First Tuesdays is the way it's become a small community. I try to make sure we--anyone on the mailing list who'd like to come--get together once or twice a year for lunch at a local Indian restaurant. We may talk shop, but it's not a reading. It's just a chance to schmooze a bit. Which reminds me that I need to set the date for the next one.
Jan 4, 2019 -

@macgenie Oh my god! Roller rinks! That, for me, mostly a summer camp memory, but yes.
Jan 4, 2019 -

@smokey After “Red Rubber Ball,” “Never My Love,” another song I’ve always liked, came up.
Jan 4, 2019 -

@smokey Great songs. I’d forgotten about Red Rubber Ball, which I really loved.
Jan 3, 2019 -

@dhe I’m kind of in the same boat. I need to keep my WordPress website and blog because it’s where I live online as a writer and poet, but I’m really liking Micro.blog. I’m realizing I will need to figure out how I want to use them, separately and in tandem. You’re idea sounds like a good place to start. Have you given thought to the different kinds of content, aside from length, you’d post on each?
Jan 3, 2019 -

@schuth I would tend to agree, unless they are very well placed and used ironically.
Jan 3, 2019 -

@JoeHoffman Hah, Joe. I never read the lines that way. Well done!
Jan 2, 2019 -

@rnv Nicely done!
Jan 2, 2019 -

@smokey I run a reading series called First Tuesdays in my neighborhood. I've been doing it now for about 6 or 7 years, but I used to attend the series before that. (It is, in fact, as far as I know, the oldest running reading series in Queens, about 12 years.) And one of the things that kept me coming back at that time was that, almost every month, at least one person who had never read their work in public got up to read and the group was just so warm and welcoming. We don't get quite so many brand new readers anymore, but it does happen, and I am happy to say that the sense of community that I valued back then has only grown. We are certainly not as disruptive/iconoclastic as the Lebanese writer in the article, but I like to think First Tuesdays does a similar--if perhaps more subtle, nuanced, and quiet--kind of work.
Jan 2, 2019 -

@smokey Thanks! I am, honestly, moved by the generosity of your comments. They make me feel truly welcome as I slowly and tentatively learn my way around.
Jan 2, 2019 -

@schuth I have always wanted to read her, but other things--mostly stuff I have to read for school--keep getting in the way.
Jan 2, 2019 -

@Ron Thanks for sharing that story. It’s interesting to think what your guidance counselor might have thought if he’d realized he completely misread Frost’s poem. Doesn’t change the wrong he did, or the value of your apology, but your story did make think of this.
Jan 2, 2019 -

@smokey Yes. I really liked that couplet and tried it in a few different variations. None of them made it into the final book, though.
Dec 31, 2018 -

@JoeHoffman That is a very good aphorismn! Truly, words to live by.
Dec 30, 2018 -

@smokey That clash, yes, but there's also something else. It's the same kind of mixed feelings I have about what to do when an institution invites someone to give a commencement speech and significant portions of the student body and/or faculty object on moral, political, what-have-you grounds, and do their best to get the institution to disinvite that person. There is a qualitative difference between a commencement speech and a talk given at the invitation of, say, a student club or faculty group or individual department. The latter is part of the academic discourse at the institution. There is, in other words, both the assumption of, and (often) the opportunity for, give and take, critique, disagreement, further discussion, and so on. The former is, in some ways, a statement by the institution about the meaning and significance of the degrees with which people will be graduating, and so it is, in some ways, an at least tacit endorsement by the institution of whatever the invited person has stood for. (And this leaves aside the whole question of how and by whom the commencement speech is financed.)

Because of this difference, disinviting the person from giving the commencement speech does not feel to me like a violation of academic freedom--and I emphasize the word feel because I am not entirely sure that I think this feeling is accurate.

I have a similar sense of unease not so much about whether or not Kanazawa should be banned from conducting research at Northwestern--I think he should not be, as long as his appointment as a visiting scholar followed the proper protocols--but, in general, about whether or not the committees that invite visiting scholars should consider things like Kanazawa's patently racist views in deciding whether or not invite him.

It's true, as the author of the blog post I linked to points out, that a visiting scholar has not real authority on the campus he or she is visiting, but I am uneasy about the extent to which the appointment--which is usually phrased as a Visiting Scholar at (fill in the institution's name)--implies an endorsement of the scholar's views. From this perspective, in other words, and to the extent that it is an appointment made by the institution, is being a visiting scholar more like the person who's invited to give the commencement address than like the person who's been invited to give a talk to a student or faculty group?

I am still figuring out what my answer to that question is.
Dec 28, 2018 -

@JohnPhilpin Thanks! I send it out once a month, though not always at the same time each month.
Dec 28, 2018 -

@ayjay That's a lovely essay. I've never read Merton, but you make me think I should. I had to learn a lot--at least for me--about Sufism when I retranslated work by the classical Persian poets Sa'di and Attar, and also some Rumi, and what you wrote about Merton resonated with that in some ways. Thanks.
Dec 28, 2018 -

@chartier I haven't subscribed yet, only because I haven't decided yet where I want to receive then newsletter, but I was really happy to see that, even in the issues I browsed, there were articles that would be useful to me. Once I know where I want to read your newsletter, you will have a new subscriber. My own most recent issue is here.
Dec 28, 2018 -

@chartier I also use Revue for the newsletter I send out about my work. I really like it as a platform. I'll have to check yours out when I get a chance.
Dec 27, 2018 -

@noahtoly That’s quite a bookshelf! I new to take a picture of mine one of these days.
Dec 27, 2018 -

@macgenie I’m planning on deleting my Facebook account on or around January 1. I haven’t decided yet what to do about Twitter, though. I kind of don’t mind it as much since I am way less connected there, but it might be nice to divest myself entirely.
Dec 27, 2018 -

@JoeHoffman Hah! I never would’ve thought of that.
Dec 26, 2018 -

@kerim I'm brand new to the community, but I am starting to see that. I'm curious, what's your specialty within anthropology. My MA is in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), but I have wandered pretty far from that over the course of my career. One of the blessings and curses of teaching at a community college--at least one as big as mine, with as big an English Department as mine--is that no one is pigeon-holed into a specialty. While I could still teach ESL if I wanted do, I have also for the past ten years been practically the only person teaching technical/workplace writing in my department, and--now that we offer an AA in the field--I am also a member of my department's creative faculty. The latter is where my current emphasis, bot personally and professionally, resides.
Dec 26, 2018 -

@alans Nicely done!
Dec 24, 2018 -

@kerim I’ve been thinking the same thing. I kind of like that it’s outside the auspices of any particular discipline/professional association. The potential for a different kind of comversation seems pretty high.
Dec 24, 2018 -

@kerim Thanks for sharing this here.
Dec 24, 2018 -

@vasta Thanks. I am glad to be here. Exploring slowly and learning the lay of the land.
Dec 23, 2018 -

@grayareas Strange, it works for me. Anyway, here's the full link: www.richardjnewman.com/how-i-fou...
Dec 22, 2018 -

@kerim Those look really interesting! Thanks for sharing them here.
Dec 22, 2018 -

@skysandison If you like jazz, try jazzlives.wordpress.com.
Dec 21, 2018 -

@smokey Thanks!
Dec 21, 2018 -

@grayareas The issue of antisemitism becomes so fraught and complex, especially (for me anyway) in progressive circles, and especially when it intersects with issues race. Which, how can it not when someone like Alice Walker is involved? I published a piece shortly after Trump was elected called The Lines that Antisemitism and Racism Draw in an online journal called Unlikely Stories. (Some people find the white text on black background of that site hard to read. If you're curious, you can get a PDF of the essay here.
Dec 21, 2018 -

@smokey That stanza from October is powerful, and salted is so the right word, with so many connotations in that context. And I like your analogy of salvaging barn doors. The bits and pieces I am posting do feel to me like "doors" of a sort, and I like the idea that, because they are fragments, I have even less control over what they open onto than I would in a finished poem, though there's not a whole hell of a lot of control in that case either.
Dec 20, 2018 -

@grayareas No problem. My understanding is that there is also a good write up about Icke in Bitch magazine, but I haven't had a chance to look it up yet.
Dec 20, 2018 -

@grayareas An important gloss on that interview and the deeply problematic David Icke is here.
Dec 20, 2018 -

@smokey Yeah, there's something about that last line that I really like, that feels powerful to me. I have no idea what it means, though. Thanks so much for reading and commenting on these. Your responses, and those of @JoeHoffman as well, have really made consider that there might be something in a "Lines Left..." series.
Dec 20, 2018 -

@justinhudgins I lived there for about a year in 1988-88, when I taught English at a hagwon in Yoksam-dong. I liked living in Seoul. I think you’re right. There is something livable about the city.
Dec 19, 2018 -

@JoeHoffman Not necessarily. The one I just created, which hasn't shown up on the timeline yet for some reason, starts with what is actually the end of a line. As I'm doing these, one of things I've been thinking is that the fragments themselves might make an interesting sequence, a kind of ghost or shadow sequence "haunting" the one to which they--or at least the poems they were once part of--"gave birth."
Dec 19, 2018 -

@smokey Thanks!
Dec 18, 2018 -

@JoeHoffman I intended it as an imperative. A lot of the poems in the series these fragments didn’t make it into are written that way.
Dec 18, 2018 -

@smokey My own experience has been that poems (and not just poems) that are sufficiently concrete in their own specificity end up speaking very clearly to those "broader audiences" than poems written intentionally to be "more general," a phrase that my students sometimes use when they tell me why they resist the specific, concrete, and particular.
Dec 18, 2018 -

@tones That must've been some poem, then!
Dec 18, 2018 -

@smokey We do, indeed.
Dec 17, 2018 -

@smokey Thanks for including me here.
Dec 16, 2018 -

@JoeHoffman That is so true! I only wish I had time. Between and among teaching, being a union officer--I spent 90 minutes parsing contract language this morning—reading, and trying to get my own writing done...well, you get the idea. Finding micro.blog inspired me to go on an almost complete social media/online cleanse, which I am going to post about soon. Maybe once that's done, I'll find time I didn't know I had.
Dec 15, 2018 -

@JoeHoffman Ok, ouch! I don't have references like that at my fingertips anynmore. My reading life has taken me far afield from Tolkien, fantasy, sci-fi (which is where I started out being a serious reader). I do miss it, though.
Dec 15, 2018 -

@JoeHoffman Forgot to add that I’m also happy to find someone here who appreciates Tolkien references.
Dec 15, 2018 -

@JoeHoffman Hah! That made me laugh out loud. Thanks.
Dec 14, 2018 -

@vasta One thing I always liked about her work is the power of its plainspokeness. The music is subtle, without a lot of ornament, and so there is a real clarity of vision. She’s a nature poet of the first order. This makes me think I should pick her up again.
Dec 14, 2018 -

@vasta That's a lovely post, and it made me very happy to see Mary Oliver's poem. I haven't read her in a very long time.
Dec 14, 2018 -

@chipotle That's hysterical. I wonder what the poet's version would say.
Dec 13, 2018 -

@smokey I just read "Egyptian Journey," which I like a lot, not just the way you capture a more realistic picture of Cairo/Egypt--that is nontheless through an outsider's eyes--but, on a purely personal level, the way it resontes with how I sometimes think (and thought) about Seoul, where I lived in the 1988-89 as an English teacher. It was a life-changing experience that I am still exploring in some ways, in both my writing and my teaching.
Dec 13, 2018 -

@smokey Thanks! I've wanted to do this series for a long time, but when I tried it on my Wordpress blog, it just didn't feel right, though I could never put my finger on why; and the couple of times I tried it on Facebook and Twitter, it was like the proverbial square peg in a round hole. Here, though, it feels like just the right fit.

I'm at work on finishing my third book, which will be called This Sentence Is A Metaphor For Bridge. Each of the poems in that book began life as a very traditional sonnet , at least in the formal sense (Shakespearian or Petrarchan). Only one of them survived revision as a complete sonnet, though. I decided to start the series with bits and pieces that I really like from the original sonnets that like but just couldn't figure out how to work into the finished manuscript.
Dec 11, 2018 -

@rnv I just realized I didn’t reply to this. I meant to say you’re right. That is a commitment. Where have you published?
Dec 11, 2018 -

@rnv It’s funny. I have the opposite reaction. I have not been able to finish Akbar’s book, but I’m almost done with Vuong’s, though I’m not sure I’d say I’m forgiving of Vuong. And your Copper Canyon/Alice James comparison is interesting. I need to think on it some.
Dec 11, 2018 -

@smokey So I started to reply to this and the whole page somehow reloaded, so I don't know if this will be redundant: I'm looking forward to checking out your blog. I'm always interested in work by people who write--as it sounds like you do--more or less only for themselves.
Dec 11, 2018 -

@rnv It's nice to hear someone else had a reaction to Vuong's work similar to mine. Have you read Kaveh Akbar's book? Also a prizewinner and also I think overrated in serious ways, though he, too, has moments of absolutely gorgeous language.
Dec 10, 2018 -

@mwillett I’m in the process of finishing up my third book (of my own poems), and I’m starting to think about possible publishers. My first two were lovely, but I’ve decided not to go with either this time around. It’s a trying, but kind of exciting process (at least for me).
Dec 10, 2018 -

@mwillett I’m a poet new to Micro.blog and I just want to say congratulations! Finishing a book is a big deal. Good for you!
Dec 10, 2018 -

@smokey Thanks! Is your work online anywhere?
Dec 7, 2018 -

@chet I don’t fully agree. I do think the final season allowed them to work through some of the underlying themes in interesting ways. Still, what you say makes sense as well.
Dec 7, 2018 -

@chet I understand that. I was curious, though, and it was interesting: a (certainly not perfect) study in how power is power, regardless of gender, and I am guessing the writers read a book called Democracy in Chains. It's worth reading.
Dec 7, 2018 -

@chet I did. What did you think?
Dec 6, 2018 -

@chet I have been thinking a lot lately about doing the same thing. Because I use social media for activities beyond the merely personal, though, untangling myself will be a little more complicated. Your post, though, was affirming. Thanks!
Dec 6, 2018 -

@Annie That’s so true! My colleagues always ask how I manage to be so prolific, despite our teaching load. It’s about staying in the process, letting the process be it’s own reward. The output always follows.
Dec 4, 2018 -

@martinfeld Thanks!
Dec 4, 2018 -

@koritsimou Hi!

Richard Jeffrey Newman's Miscellany

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