Teaching Poetry Now: sunypress.edu/Books/T/Teac...

i love my trans whaanau they are everything / we will fight this a poem i wrote a year ago for my genderqueer loves

"a book which celebrates the swerve poetry has taken towards exuberance, intimacy, eroticism, artistry and a gaudy beauty" www.nzbooklovers.co.nz/post/intervi...

Found this handsome hardback at 北沢書店 in 神田 today, on the same shelf I found About the House many years ago. These late, late poems doing all sorts of amazing things: “None of us are as young / as we were. So what? / Friendship never ages.”

Just submitted my final page proofs. Forthcoming in March 2026. www.sup.org/books/asian-...

<<どうも、白人至上主義や陰謀論はクソなんだけれでも、BLM運動が代表するような現代アメリカの左派文化運動も同じくらいクソである、といったシニシズムが、これら2本の映画には通底していて、ああ、これが今のアメリカの「気分」なのかと暗い気分になったのでした>> shintak.hatenadiary.jp/entry/2025/1...

“The book is haunted by complicity, and it is haunting in its insistence on remembering every betrayal. Dropbear was committed to the power of poetry to roll back the terrors and violence of colonialism. The Rot, more bereft, seems unsure.” theconversation.com/grim-funny-a...

Charming (& tiny) exhibition of Moriwaki Masumi’s “cool boys and tough girls” in Kichijōji.

I love to see stuff like this because it helps explain to people trapped in tech-sponsored information bubbles the actually obvious fact that universities teach people to know & think things, and AI is a way to produce the effect of knowing & thinking things w/o actually knowing & thinking them.

“I very much wanted… to be a bridge between my Māori relations and my Pākehā relations, and I wanted very much to make explicit, explicable, the spiritual world.” thespinoff.co.nz/books/31-10-...

This essay began its life a long time ago, in conversation with an @elccprogramme.bsky.social Summer Scholar, Tuioleloto Laura Toailoa. It’s taken years to bring some of that early thinking to fruition. Thank you so much to the Defoe Society for this award

Gender-affirming crockery.

“You can only critically assess the output of an AI chatbot if you have the skills to do so, and you don’t develop these skills by using AI. Before you can be critical of an AI summary, you have to learn to understand a text without having it summarized by an AI tool.” apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

“I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested. I'm 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak. ... The other day, somebody wrote me an email, said, ‘What is your stance on AI?’ And my answer was very short. I said, ‘I'd rather die.’” 🫡

Congratulations to Don Mee Choi, whose collection Mirror Nation has been shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2025 🎉

Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa, edited by Anna Jackson, Dougal McNeill and Robert Sullivan will be launched at Unity Books (Wgtn) on Friday at 6. Enjoy readings from some of the featured poets and essayists, and some lively conversation about NZ poetry!

The entire "free speech on campus" moral panic was manufactured to blackmail us into making space in intellectual life for bigots and charlatans who couldn't get there on their own merits. Its a DEI scheme for fascism. Congratulations to everyone who took it at face value.

Nigella Lawson's HOW TO EAT (1998) is a great text for thinking about approaching poetry in the undergraduate classroom, something I'd known without realising and that this tweet helped make clear.

What if we just let Canvas stay down… forever?

"To all who rely on these public sector workers [...] now is the time to publicly, visibly show your support and refute the toxic narratives of the government" iso.org.nz/2025/10/20/o...

Grateful to Nicola Andrews for this generous and open review of our book. Love to follow the conversation as it goes along in the world . www.ketebooks.co.nz/en/reviews/r...

“The waters between Fukuoka and Pusan narrowed through intensified interactions that continued even after the end of empire, creating enduring legacies for the postwar and postcolonial eras.” www.ucpress.edu/books/the-na...

This is not a time to look away: justiceforpalestine.nz/2025/10/13/j...

I wrote about what I found this week digging about in the enormous new Poems of Seamus Heaney someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/pinks-37-t...

I wrote about the divide between high school and college English, and what we might do to bridge it, for @publicbooks.bsky.social—part of an excellent roundtable on higher ed under Trump organized by @dennismhogan.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/toward-the-h...

“I would love for them to reject the ideal of “debate” as such, because serious intellectual reflection is not something you can win or lose.” adamkotsko.substack.com/p/pedagogy-i...

First entry for gimbap from 1966, a nicely evocative description of a North Carolina picnic. www.hani.co.kr/arti/english...

“Poetry is not a democratic process!” badapple.gay/2025/08/08/v...

“In a culture of artificial lights, flashes, and filters, what transforms is not what shines but what burns. Not what seduces but what guides. Genuine religious practice is the art of listening for what no machine will ever pronounce” www.commonwealmagazine.org/technology-a...

First cast out the beam of thine own eye: once again, the blame for this rubbish slopping through education doesn’t start with students (the least powerful) but with those in positions to push it (the most powerful), some of whom are no better than they ought to be!! www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/5...

you're going to want to read Glavey reading Berlant reading Ashbery

“If war is the test of reality, then all poetry is unreal; but in that case unreality is a virtue.” I found this beautiful, wise & extraordinarily careful & caring book quite by accident in the stacks yesterday. I wish I’d known it years ago.

Out in the world, our book celebrating the swerve poetry has taken towards exuberance, intimacy, eroticism, artistry and a gaudy beauty! I especially love the artist statements by the featured poets (Oscar Upperton: a rhyme is a way of getting an exclamation mark into a poem by stealth). !

Our book is released today. It's edited following the "grand elementary principle of pleasure". I love all the poems and critical essays we've gathered together, found much insight & delight in my co-editors' insights as poets, & hope youse can too. aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz/te-whariki/

“It's not an album. It's a product for sale, and it sounds like one”: defector.com/taylor-swift...

Aifter the boombers cleck and the sodgers traik thro the skau there’s an auld air sterts up – bubblin and greetin. It’s a ballant mithers sing on their hunkers i the stour for a bairn deid. They ken it by hert. —Alastair Mackie, “Pietà” The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse, @canongate.co.uk 2021

Scandal: “occasions of sin that lead others into moral error” www.americamagazine.org/faith-and-re...

“The question becomes how to protect our ability to respond, even if it means protecting a physical and psychological symptom like restlessness. Perhaps, even, how to attend to the symptom in ways that shape our political action” www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/on-...

Some things I've been working on as chair of my department - sharing in case anyone finds its useful. 1. A GenAI Framework for English Courses

Claiming that the “substantive content” is unchanged makes this worse. It suggests the references followed the conclusions, rather than the conclusions following the evidence. Another example of why those pushing this rubbish in universities are so irresponsible. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Today’s mail!

“these ragged-edged household gods were meant to serve as a reminder that we are all shards of a larger whole that transcends our ken. That the edge of our skin is not an end but a beginning, not a closing off but an opening up, not an answer but a mystery” www.commonwealmagazine.org/corpus-chris...

Our book gets launched in Wellington in a few weeks and youse are all welcome. The Tokyo launch is in November!

Jackson McCarthy taking a turn: nzpoetryshelf.com/2025/10/01/p...

For want o luve we live on hate, For want o Heven praise the State, For want o richts we worship rules, For want o gods the glibbest fules… —Sydney Goodsir Smith, “Prolegomenon: The Deevil’s Waltz” in A KIST O SKINKLAN THINGS #Scots #poem #poetry #Scotstober #richts asls.org.uk/publications...

“It’s also easy to forget that the convergence and mutual support between the Palestine solidarity campaign, Māori resistance, and the trade union movement in 2025 – which now seems like common sense – is also completely unprecedented” iso.org.nz/2025/10/01/t...

Bit glum reading two reviews in a row praising a new collection’s “lack of pretension”, “unpretentious” verse & “non-poetic” vocabulation, esp when examples they quote are gloriously razzle dazzling. If I owned a beret or a cravat I’d be wearing them today as a personal protest.

Our task as educators is to host a dialogue between students and field. The version of the field that students internalize will be their own unique process of metabolizing field knowledge. When students use tools that mediate that process, I worry that they will never meet their own interpretation.

“And find at last its place and aim in life”: it’s going to be something seeing this (& the library!) face to face: newsroom.co.nz/2025/09/30/a...

"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny." www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...