You can't put anything into words; they are already full; you can only ask them to occur in an order and then notice how they respond to each other and you.

We didn't say body cams on ICE. Their murders are already on video. We said no more ICE.

I get tired of saying it, but I’ll say it again: the nature of oppression in America is that they workshop it first on Black, Latino, Asian & Native people. But it is always, in the end, coming for everyone.

The word dismantle has been dogging me in various forms all morning. (Not kindly, not unkindly. Determined.) And the image of a sugar cube. And I do not have time to write a poem. And my notebook is out of reach. So.

This exactly why I tell people to fight misogyny and child abuse if they want to fight authoritarianism. Those are pillars of fascism that so many people think are “normal” parts of a “democratic” society. News flash: they have no place in a democratic society.

This from @andreapitzer.bsky.social is key. “nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.”

It’s a shame that Glasgow don’t have any artists.

“But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we've taken toward integration, I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house."  Dr. King said this famous quote on March 27th, 1968, mere days before his murder. But the context around the quote is interesting...

Yesterday I taught a class about the historiography of Stonewall. I used the official defacing of the Stonewall National Monument - removing the TQ+ by the administration - to illustrate how public memory and debates about history, aka historiography, have relevance today. Next year I'll use this.

i once read "the rights you think criminals should have are the rights you think everyone should have because the state can criminalize anyone" and it changed how i think about everything

In a country with an actual free press, the photo of that poor old man would be the cover of every single paper with a headline that reads ENOUGH.

Hmong man detained by ICE today in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Photo via Reuters)

Dislike the days where lines from "England in 1819" start running at random through my head.

In 2026, we're launching an ambitious effort to track legacy news media's coverage of the trans community, with a focus on the words news outlets choose and how those are changing as right wing pressure threatens the independence of our press. www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

Nobody is “grooming” your kids to be gay or trans but people are grooming them to be Nazis.

ICE/CBP just shot two people in Portland.

Confirmation here. katu.com/news/local/i...

Make it viral.

They shoot people, then lie about it, almost as if that's their job.

“We are here to say no — no to the kidnapping of our neighbors, no to the normalization of fascist violence. We are here because our love and decency are stronger than our fears, and because we know we will find courage in each other.”

Minneapolis.

this was also consensus opinion for center-right types after george floyd’s murder five years ago. the state media apparatus will be working overtime the next few weeks to reprogram them

an eyewitness to the Minneapolis ICE shooting told me the victim appeared "obviously scared" and "was going to leave" before an ICE agent fired multiple shots "right into, it seemed like, her face" www.huffpost.com/entry/ice-sh...

Like those before it, that insane, vile DHS statement about the Minneapolis shooting isn't about covering anything up. It's performative lying. They aren't trying to persuade anyone that their agents did nothing wrong. They're trying to project that their agents can get away with anything.

losing my mind at the "she should have followed directions" people really? really? you're cool with "if you don't follow directions, they get to kill you"? that seems like a good state of affairs to you? that seems like how law enforcement ought to work: instant obeisance or death?

Working on syllabi apparently sets off some Rube Goldberg machine in my mind that ends with a hammer smashing a toothpaste tube full of poems--two have already come out today.

“I watched it literally like you are watching a television show" could be a sentence he uttered about any one of his cursed administration's actions.

"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