"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

This made me happy.

When the president says "Thank you very much. It’s a very important thing to say. And we mean it" to families of the students who were killed at Brown, what exactly is he thanking them for?

Sometimes you write lines in such a way that they will refuse to separate in future, like spaghetti you forgot to stir.

I wrote an essay for @bostonreview.bsky.social about what I learned about close reading when I taught at West Virginia University www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

Again, there is no plan for running our universities without federal funding, or foreign students, at scale. But the public has no idea about this because no. one. is. telling. them. this. They expect their kids are still going to be able to do all the things at college in the next 4 years, & well:

Linguistics is so bananas: "[A]nother banana signals an additional banana in addition to some first banana."

Reading the news right now is not great. One of the hardest things about writing IN THE RHODODENDRONS was hearing the reactions--of people I thought I knew--to the fact that a man in his twenties brought me into an alleyway to have sex with me while I was drunk and fourteen.

BREAKING: In AAUP et al v. Trump (wall-to-wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of TItle VI to reshape the University of California system), the faculty and staff of the UC system WON!!! We were granted our preliminary injunction! @aaup.org

Whenever I see this kind of tech advertised, I can't stop thinking about all of the unruly, interior parts of a life, which affect how we behave but are distasteful to the sensibilities of profit-seeking owners (and imagined users) and therefore doomed to be deleted from posthumous avatars.

I remember buying my first not-for-a-class book of contemporary poetry at the Grolier Book Shop when I was a baby poet and tonight I am almost completely grown up and reading there with fellow adult @rvtrousdale.bsky.social

Teaching Inger Christensen's Alphabet today and no matter what else happens that is an indisputable good.

There's a lot of pressure on women to find innovative ways to ruin the workplace--let's team up and share some strategies that have worked?

I really love Elliot's readings.

Two more events this month and then I am done with book-travel until January. Next week Boston (see flier for details), then Madison on Nov 22. (Flier coming soon.) If you live in one of those places I would like to read poems to you with my actual mouth.

The “they’re rapists” line from racists is not about women’s autonomy or dignity; it’s not even about the wrongness of rape. It is about white men’s property interests over white women. It’s not “they’re doing something horrible”; it’s “they’re raping the ones only you have a right to rape.”

"[T]he formulaic is recast as reflecting human nature...as opposed to a feature of algorithmically generated content that usefully serves to shrink audiences' horizons and harden their tastes, thereby making it easier to predict what they will or won't consume next."

The word "boing" is one I find incredibly embarrassing to be associated with/be made to say aloud. So I put it in a poem. (This one.)

Y’all here is a fun fact: Portland has a brand new volunteer organization called “operation inflation” that allows people to borrow inflatable costumes for protests. They just started a couple weeks ago and have like a 160 costume library (and counting because people keep donating).

the owlishness of certain people Heather Christle, from PAPER CROWN

Curious how other people might answer this question (borrowed from W. S. Graham)

"It’s a form of resistance that requires us to put aside ego, and the need for personal gratification, to become a node in a living network of care, support, and defense." More than anything else I hope the legacy of this moment will be organized care everywhere

Going back and forth between listening to podcasts about the Spanish Civil War and holding a kitten and reading about large language models and holding a kitten and writing about universities' capitulation to the loyalty oath during the red scare and holding a kitten... thank you, kitten.

Wrote about Vanessa Bell--Modernist artist (and Virginia Woolf's sister)--and the various kinds of host one can be, with a little light antifascism on the side.

TIL that the CEO of Core Civic (the private detentions company who runs the only known ICE facility holding families...

It's here!

Breaking news from Des Moines: ICE has detained Dr. Ian Roberts, the superintendent of Iowa's largest school district. The Des Moines Public Schools said "We have no confirmed information as to why Dr. Roberts is being detained or the next potential steps." www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/09/26/i...

accidentally ordered a dinner that matches my book

One tech company's slogan is NEVER WONDER and another is literally called PANOPTO and in conclusion I have no words or expect that to soon be the case.

seriously. The Big Dumb Algorithm can be bent as much by a twenty-second "loved it" as an eight-page screed.

NYC TONIGHGHT

Seeking a term akin to proprioception but for the sense of one's mortality; does such a thing exist? (I swear I am so fun to talk to.)

Let me tell you, the number of times where having For Grace After a Party by Frank O'Hara memorized has come in handy is less than five but it sure is more than zero.

Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are asking Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for answers after more than a dozen people died in immigration detention, as the department rushes to expand.

It's feeling more and more important to be able to gather together in physical space, hope I get to see some of you! 9/26 NYC (McNally Jackson Seaport) 10/4 ATL (Decatur Book Festival) 10/16 Sarah Lawrence 10/30 Hollins University

they’re putting Kimmel back on the air. I would now like to see the same amount of outrage for the firing of professors for their statements

Today’s poem is selected by Heather Christle (@heatherchristle.bsky.social) as part of the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry.

Today’s poem: Heather Christle, “I know what I’m talking about” #lunchpoems

Researching and writing this was a joy. I began in an attitude of skepticism and ended elsewhere.

If you memorize a poem you will have it with you in an emergency. You could add that to your list.

We have been shadowbanned on this event and yet we are nearly sold out…come help us sell out and show your love and support for Palestine and Gaza. www.ticketmaster.com/voices-for-g...

I am going to be reading/talking in these places this month: 9/2 Memoiring Book Club (online) 9/4 The Writer's Center (online) 9/11 Amherst Books (Amherst, MA) 9/17 & 9/18 Emory University (Atlanta, GA) 9/26 McNally Jackson Books Seaport (NYC) More details below!

Managed to write a thousand words about poetry without (I am almost certain) lying.

Unraveling of federal arts funding infrastructure continues. Hard to describe the decades of debates & advocacy invested in sustaining the CW fellowships at the NEA. Now, wiped out.

Our fall issue is coming! We have essays by @heatherchristle.bsky.social, Oliver Egger, and Ash Sanders; interviews with Laura van den Berg, @blondieband.bsky.social, and Richard Ayoade, conducted by @rokwon.bsky.social, Emma Ingrisani, and Wallace Shawn; poetry, reviews, and more.

Reading about neuroscience leads me to reconfirm that a fundamental quality I value in poetry is its ability to "perturb those restless proactive seas." Poetry loves to get in the way.

This is true of so many phrases. Every word is a choice: Which actions are we naming? Which are we hiding?

Pretty sure this diagram is making fun of me.

How the word “breaking” appears again and again on posts announcing the IDF killing people in Gaza.

"Reading through a stack of the summer’s new books, I’ve found plenty of poetry as funny as written-down stand-up comedy: poems to be laughed at, in only the most affirmative senses."