Indianapolis Star, November 22, 1918

My love for em dashes is as old as the hills and as mighty as my inability to make a transition between thoughts literally any other way and I will be damned if I let the clankers take that from me

a load-bearing component of “the magic of Christmas” is the invisible domestic labor of moms you are now realizing how much she was doing for you and instead of just thanking her you’ve decided it’s about the decline of civilization

this is quite the detail

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; Rainer Maria Rilke, Evening; tr. Stephen Mitchell

Book Cover of the Day:

a little extra shine last night

Two poems by Jennifer Militello badlilies.uk/jennifer-mil...

Poets, start your wild, precious engines.

"But when the team looked at the employees’ actual work output, they found that the developers had completed tasks 20% slower when using AI than when working without it. Researchers were stunned. “No one expected that outcome. We didn’t even really consider a slowdown as a possibility.” 🎁link

NH poet laureate Jennifer Militello, an open reading, and an open musical Interlude... frostplace.org/sundays-in-t...

"If you want to write...you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling...You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfume." Ray Bradbury

Identifying the Pathogen is available for preorder from @tupelopress.bsky.social —this brand new hybrid poetic fictiony set of lab notebooks ! 📚🩻💖 press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Very much looking forward to my next @arvonfoundation.bsky.social class next month. Come along!

Congratulations to Jennifer Militello, NH's Poet Laureate, for being awarded a Poet Laureate Fellowship prize from the Academy of American Poets! We're honored to host her for our final installment of "Sundays in the Barn with Bob" on Sunday, 8/24, starting at 3pm. poets.org/academy-amer....

TP author Jennifer Militello, Poet Laureate Fellow of New Hampshire, has been selected as one of the American Academy 2025 Poet Laureate Fellows! Congratulations Jennifer! poets.org/academy-amer...

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.

things were better when the computer lived in its own specific room and you only went in there sometimes

“Small children from poor or middle-class families who watch ‘Sesame Street’ do better on cognitive tests and in first grade than children who do not watch it,” Renata Adler wrote, in 1972.

“...if you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley, at the top of a cliff you haven’t even climbed. Thisis a lesson that can only be learned by trial and error.” -- Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey

Congrats to all of the Poet Laureate Fellows from the Academy of American Poets!

If I have to explain to you why it's a bad idea to use a machine that makes shit up 15-80% of the time AND destroys the environment AND contributes to rising fascism and genocide AND puts brilliant skillful creatives out of work by stealing their work, then we're already speaking different languages

Thank you to the Academy of American Poets! ❤️❤️❤️

"ChatGPT is great for brainstorming!" Actually we have a tool for that already! It's called thinking. We use our brain. It's called brainstorming! Clue is in the name.

Paperback books are like velveteen rabbits — ours to be loved and squeezed and read and stuffed into shoulder bags and left in the sun and read and read again until there's nothing left but memories from something real

It's just a “swarm of fish" following a duck.

“Small children from poor or middle-class families who watch ‘Sesame Street’ do better on cognitive tests and in first grade than children who do not watch it,” Renata Adler wrote, in 1972.

The shoebill stork looks like a dinosaur.. 🦖 Such a beautiful looking bird… 🐦

Reminder that @bookshop.org has free shipping the next few days, no reason, just for fun 😉

There is an issue with flies coming into the house. Normal people: gets flypaper or something. Me:

"i asked chatgpt" yeah well i went to the doctor, i went to the mountains, i looked to the children, i drank from the fountains there's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line and the less I seek my source for some definitive closer I am to fine

Finally, a Holy War I can join

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." W. B. Yeats

Poets Laureate Julia Bouwsma (ME) and Jennifer Militello (NH) reading at the VT Statehouse and WGDR.org’s Joseph Gainza shares a poem of Twilight. Lend yr ears at 5pm to PoemCity 2025.

Get lost in the works of Sonja Livingston, Cynthia Gralla, and Jennifer Militello, as well as the other authors featured in our Spring 2025 issue, over this long weekend. https://pshr.us/spring25

What is it, the heart, is it the sound of the pine trees blowing in the painting? —Ikkyū, tr. Mary Ruefle

John Ashbery

applying for jobs again

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

NEW: NOAA retires its widely cited billion-dollar weather and climate database amid staff cuts. Unique database had been tallying disaster costs for 45 years. www.cnn.com/2025/05/08/c...

We are deeply saddened by the news that our dear contributor Martha Silano has died. We loved her unique poetic voice & appreciated her kind spirit. We will miss her. Please take a moment to read her poem, "You can't trust," which hits a little different now: buff.ly/0XG54mL

Bizarrely framed article about the people (all women) who ‘refuse to use AI’. And a #philosophy professor who says “The moment to opt out of #AI has already passed”. Oh well. That’s that then. 🤷‍♂️ #AIEthics www.bbc.com/news/article...

Oh this hurt. By the brilliant Tess Gallagher.

@bookshop.org is offering free shipping for #IndependentBookstoreDay, so I'm sharing my curated lists bookshop.org/shop/oliviac...

Fellow authors, I love you, and I know it feels like we don’t have a choice, but B&N and Am*zon both scheduled sales this week to preempt Independent Bookstore Day, a hugely vital source of income for indie bookstores. Please don’t promote their sales; please promote your local indie this week.

Tomorrow, a certain online mega-retailer launches a book sale, just days before Indie Bookstore Day on 4/26. This is no coincidence; Bookstore Day is one of the largest revenue drivers for indies. Indies need our support to thrive & build community spaces for all...mega-retailers do not.

“Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.” ~ James Baldwin