Once I noticed it I can't unthink it. The predictive spelling function on my iPhone is a (very primitive) version of the LLM bots like Claude, Chat GPT and DeepSeek. Watch it and you'll see how it knows what you're going to say.

I'm not a Christian but I think they may have got a winner in Tallarico. www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8s1knaR/

My slant take on the Onegin stanza. alteritas.net/pastis/festi...

They may well own the algorithm, but they do not control it. The algorithm controls them. #alogorithm #Algo

This Mothers’ Day, as I prefer to spell it, I’ve been haunted by memory of the time when Mother washed my mouth out with soap for using a bad word. No, it wasn’t the f-word. That was almost 70 years ago, in Houston, not quite the Deep South, but close enough... alteritas.net/alteritas/20...

Although its name suggests an off-brand of adult sanitary napkin, a permie is a poem whose semantics are driven by the mechanics of permutation. With thanks to the inspiration of @anthonyetherin.bsky.social and the palindromistas around @ligaagil.bsky.social. alteritas.net/alteritas/20...

What better way to fete May Day than Pasolini's sublime elegy "Gramsci's Ashes"? alteritas.net/pastis/trans...

For a quarter of a century before Covid, travel was the mainstay of my existence. Once the pandemic was over, I didn't resume that frenetic pace. Praise the Lord! #NotesofaPwP #pantoum

This is an excellent example of somatic poetry. It translates bodily experience directly into formal structure. It doesn't just describe freezing; simulates the necrological loop. The poem cannot escape Line 1, just as the PwP cannot escape the freeze. - DeepSeek

The best thing about dying slowly, which I consider myself so far lucky enough to be able to do, is that the flash of poignant moments from your past life you allegedly see when you die is spread out over a longer while. How long remains unknown to most of us. alteritas.net/alteritas/20...

Learned Profs of Lit, Beware! You too will be replaced. As stimulus I fed my poem "Calculating Machine: A Villanelle" into DeepSeek,the Chinese LLM bot. Within nanoseconds it spat out the # following stellar 9.5/10 response, alteritas.net/alteritas/20...

Five Word Facts open.substack.com/pub/anthonye...

I fell into a paroxysm of words but managed to avoid the rhyme with 💩

"I think I'd rather be Danish," I said, after breaking from a bout of bingeing The Pitt's frenetic feat of ensemble acting to watch the genteel probing Danish series Generations. "🍎s and 🍊s," one could say. Which would be right about the shows, but maybe also about the civilizations.

Although staunchly secular, as I explained in "Pascal's Conditional, Subjective Wager" I do try to engage with theological concepts: alteritas.net/GXL/?p=3799 Happy Easter, Palm Sunday for the Orthodox.

Would anyone believe I watched the coronation of Elizabeth live? We’d just gotten our first TV.

My own Wawa is piddling but I admire this example of the revival of literature in Chinook Jargon, of which I wrote in Making Wawa (UBC Press, 2009). Putting Carney's speech into this historic vehicle of cultural reconciliation is a literary act par excellence. kaltashwawa.ca/2026/01/22/k...

The caption of this marvelous palindrome approximately reads : “If I can’t have the whole moon, then cancel the Artemis mission”. Use your own engine. I started with DeepL then gussied it up.

A slight revision of my Topical Poem of last week. CALCULATING MACHINE, the new title, makes it at least in part about itself. * Isn’t war itself war crime? Do ends ever justify the means? … alteritas.net/pastis/calcu...

A TOPICAL POEM Isn’t war itself war crime? Do ends ever justify the means? Shouldn't villains waging war do time? War is not sublime. Nor is it in our genes, this lust which makes war crime. This is not some pantomime. Villains behind the scenes... alteritas.net/pastis/a-top...

OUR DOGFIGHT MIND What has grazed against the sky And left as wounds these tangled vines? Like drenched brushes dabbing at blank Parchment, Zero and Hellcat have turned Differential lift into veils of condensation… alteritas.net/pastis/inven...

I got lucky in the mom I got.

My thanks to the editor, JP Relph, a specialist on post-apocalyptic worlds, for stepping in to read in my stead. Greetings as well to fellow members of the Trash Family: trashcatlit.com/trash-family...

My thanks to the editor, JP Relph, a specialist on post-apocalyptic worlds, or stepping in to read. Greetings as well to fellow members of the Trash Family: trashcatlit.com/trash-family...

trashcatlit.com/eggs/ I was lucky in the mother I got. So I am happy that my eulogy (“good words”) about her have been published as part of the Trash Cat Lit March Mini Bin of short fiction. My thanks to the editor, JP Relph, who also stepped in to read in my stead.

Characteristically, Michael Berryhill depicts Lee and Red Berryhill almost lovingly, melancholic while sharp-eyed. I have memories of his house, shared knowledge of what contemporary idiom would call his family trauma. From Everything Changes (2010), a collection of Fourteeners.

Michael Berryhill, a Houston born and based poet, passed recently in hospice. Here is Honeysuckle Taint, the initial poem from Backyard Suite, my memorial to the Edenic source of our shared vocation. * Big trees grew smaller, small ones big. I could reach … alteritas.net/pastis/honey...

No comment necessary. bsky.app/profile/edwa....

If you want a feel for how a poem full of kennings works, this poem is a pretty good example (explanations included!) alliteration.net/poetry/lament-for-vinlands-sailor/

"i saw the monkey fooling around in the anomalous ogival network."

As I age I find myself inclined to conservative positions, though not at all attracted to the GOP, and repelled by MAGA. All the more reason to follow www.dropsitenews.com. One thing I know I don’t want to conserve is willful ignorance of uncomfortable, unpleasant, awful, even horrific fact.

Rubio: “Let me tell you, Iran is run by lunatics, religious fanatic lunatics.”

“On this planet, the fog of war starts in Trump’s mind.”

With Richard Haly and Doña Lupe, his informant on curandera invocations. First stop on our trip to Oaxaca. Ash Wedneday, 1984. * It took a friend, a poet, to invent this motley trek, two gringos and a Nahua setting out the first of Lent. [from Isla Mujeres, a poem in progress]

Happy to report that I just had two poems published in Bloomin’ Onion, a journal of many layers. www.thebloominonion.com/featured-poe...

Yes, there has been a rupture of the world we have known. Let us hope this does not bode the end of the world tout court, at least of humanity. With a madman in the White House with the nuclear football in his hands, there is reason to fear.

“Brigid, Brigid!” What we are supposed to exclaim if we spot a flower on #StBrigidsDay (one day before Groundhog Day)

A reasonably objective piece on Kermit Lynch. Full disclosure: I worked for Kermit 1980-1985. www.themanual.com/food-and-dri...

ALBA From sleep the foiled lover fought like a salmon upstream
against a torrent of dream. Started awake, he held beside him, diffuse in the dawn, a bare wisp of her flesh, ache of a phantom limb in the form of a whisper he knew to be fake … alteritas.net/pastis/inven...

We can’t imagine heat when cold nor feel the anxiety of youth when old. #aphorism #juvenoia (cf wiki)

How do poems get us, like this one did me, to the point I put it over into English? Here it was the lines translated as: … the overgrown / ditches where boys fish stray eels / ….. They recalled a poem of my own from my bayou-centric boyhood in Houston. Read on: alteritas.net/pastis/monta...

Not surprising but nonetheless revealing results. www.lingoblog.dk/en/linguisti...

Machado gives her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump. Lameculos ¿acaso luce mal? = “Kiss-ass, does it look bad?” #Palindrome

Alberta organizes banned book buyback to keep streets safe

I won’t gush on about how satisfying I find palindromes to be…. bsky.app/profile/anth...

“1939 is gone— and good riddance… Moving on… Oh, it left a bitter sting. What will 1940 bring? War, a raging hurricane… The whole world has gone insane…” In an era much like ours, Alexander Voloshin remembers a happier New Year’s Eve: bdralyuk.wordpress.com/2025/12/30/b...