from the Yaqui Deer Dance, versioned here by Jerome Rothenberg

A love letter to the greatest double act in cinema, My Ear Is Full of Milk gathers poets, essayists, and storytellers who have spent a lifetime laughing with, and thinking through, Laurel & Hardy. www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...

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Excellent essay. “When offered a poem, and time, and attention, and good faith, my students offered their own arguments back as if they had been waiting their whole lives for the chance; they reciprocated my trust many times over.” www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

Word as Word 4: miſdemeanor

Congratulations to Andrew McMillan, MBE!

"The great honesty and authenticity of both editors and contributors should help put close reading where it belongs: in the center of the humanities."

rob mclennan reviewed Pierre Joris's Poasis II on his blog! Check it out: robmclennan.blogspot.com/2025/12/pier... Also, don’t miss out on our 40% off holiday sale! Use code QGIFT25 now until January 31, 2026 to get your discount on all Wesleyan University Press books! #pierrejoris #poasisii

Glen Baxter

“It’s been nine months of struggle and anguish with daily hiccups,” Michelle Bolsonaro said. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Prose poems, again.

Forget Twixtmas. Today is Twentieth Century Blues Day, the anniversary of my beginning (1989) the project (robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/05/twen...) and finishing it (2000) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2025/03/robe...), and it's happily still in print (www.saltpublishing.com/products/com...)!

It was. Happy Christmas from Glen Baxter and me.

The penultimate week of recording everything I buy from the supermarket reduced counter this year. This week, some festive disruption.

I know the feeling.

Up to midnight with Beverly Kenney. I hope everyone had the best Christmas Day available to them.

A fascinating read. It nearly set me off on a whole new caper with my 'fictional poets' project: euoia.weebly.com. But I resisted...

Jarring to see another firing of a university lecturer and then go reread the Harper’s Letter (this passage is about censoriousness on the left)

Why a lip-reader hasn't been employed to transcribe this clip is beyond me.

That's not how it works. The Prime Minister can't delay the dissolution of Parliament beyond the 9th July 2029. If he tries, then the king just dissolves Parliament and the election is scheduled for the deadline of 15th April 2029. And that's that. The PM has no power to delay past the deadline.

Who’s going to tell them all that the research is fun, and why many of us got into academia*? I fell in love with research. I am infatuated by it. I am obsessed with creating new knowledge. Research is at least 60% reading what other people have written and think. Reading is part of the fun.

I like peeping thru the window at Radio Merseyside. Somewhere in the gloom there's a Dalek waiting!

Thrilled to receive an early Christmas present from @englishjournaloup.bsky.social with a review of The Process of Poetry 🙏 academic.oup.com/english/arti... The book would make a fabulous Christmas gift! Please share! @flyonthewallpress.bsky.social #Christmaspresent #poetry

'reading avoidance is nothing new: “not reading,” writes Lisa Marie Rhody, “is the dirty open secret of all literary critics.”' eve.gd/2025/12/22/o...

David Hayden posts selections of poems from a range of traditions. Anna Mendelssohn is a difficult writer to read in quantity (there is a very big collected from Shearsman, published after her death) but her work continues to demand something unusual from readers: it is not like anything else.

A great poem by a great poet. (Another friend told me of a similar encounter as the one in the poem. I've not had the chance to tell Chris yet.)

Last year I realised as we were sending our trad. NY cards that there were a whole load of folk that we knew, but lacked the address of. So I posted this: a video of me showing Patricia's image and reading my poem. Seems appropriate still : robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2024/12/merr...

The Graf Zeppelin over Crosby (north of Liverpool) in 1933.

Rolling out the sound condenses over ice, sea smoke trails the boat, twists of light letter the air, a language holding low around the edges of the world, empty and endless for the mind to lodge at zero. Kelvin Corcoran

Yup!

Today’s painting is of the St Philip Neri Catholic Church in Liverpool. The Byzantine inspired building was built during WW1 and carries that haunted age with it. I’ve been pushing my palette to capture the spectral quality I sense when I spend time with the building. #liverpool #art

❄️ #IronMenCrosby Advent Day 22 A gentle evening. The light fading quietly with no great show of colour, no blaze of light, no fanfare to mark the last day of 19 years of the Iron Men on Crosby beach. Tomorrow is a landmark day, the 1st July is the 20th Anniversary of their presence on the beach.

Oh!

Belfast ship builders Harland & Wolff had a significant engineering and foundry presence in Bootle, Liverpool from 1913 to 1960. Images here of the foundry in operation in 1947.

Sick of Christmas carols? Tune in to hear me read 'The Place to Hide a Body', and eleven other stories read by their authors.

chbernstein.substack.com Written from an LLM’s POV, this essay argues that “LLM style” reflects institutional language norms, not machine intent. Drawing on Adorno & Wittgenstein, it shows how AI exposes the social production of coherence, authenticity, and the “human.”

❄️ #IronMenCrosby Advent Day 21 The mountains of Eryri, Snowdonia, outlined against a vivid sky just after sunset. Thin high clouds diffused the golden glow into streaks of amber and orange across the evening sky. A perfect end to a fine winter’s day for the iron men on Crosby beach.

Reform UK flagship Kent council planning ‘huge’ cuts in adult social care

as a historian i have spent several hours going down rabbit holes to find an original 19th-century newspaper article rather than relying on a transcription or someone else's discussion of it and some folks cant be bothered to verify that the papers they cite are real, far less read them?? 😭

happy holidays from this vowel wreath by Jim Leftwich

The White House has been caught. The administration inserted a photo of Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross into the Epstein files and falsely implied it showed them with victims. In reality, it’s a publicly available fundraiser photo featuring Jackson and Ross’s own children.

Delighted to have my poem “Straitjacket” as part of Greg Thomas’ beautiful postcard series, paired with Fèlix Delandre’s resonant “chaos.” To order and support this wonderful small press: oo-press.com/postcard-poems

Go check out Bob for Wired!

A lovely comment from Nancy Holmes Hopkins on X re this post: “The soulfulness of your vision has been recognized and now shared and celebrated. Yes, to the hours of watching. Yes, to the search for meaning in each look out to the horizon. Yes, to the man who stands proud today.”

The story of Farage and Putin, told by British-Ukrainian soldier Shaun Pinner on a destroyed apartment block in Kyiv.

Today is my birthday so we’ve been a bit busy doing fun things. But I did manage to do a bit of drawing too - which I’d been missing doing after a week at work. Today’s piece is of the Blackburne Arms on Catherine Street in #liverpool Georgian Quarter. An old favourite pub of ours. #art

Christmas begins with a beautiful book 🎄 Four unforgettable Salt reads — fiction, poetry, short stories and dark magic — all available now at your local bookshop. Support bookshops. Christmas books you won’t forget. #SaltBooks #ChristmasBooks #IndieBookshops