I hereby pledge to bungle reels for all my days.

Micro-season: Wasps donate their yellow to the leaves. Moon Phase: Kurt Vile.

People are talking about The Rapture? I imagine that event in my own strange little way in this poem published a while back in @triquarterlymag.bsky.social : www.triquarterly.org/issue-154/th...

Micro-season: Wasps donate their yellow to the leaves. Moon Phase: Kurt Vile.

People are talking about The Rapture? I imagine that event in my own strange little way in this poem published a while back in @triquarterlymag.bsky.social : www.triquarterly.org/issue-154/th...

Ah, yes, the five dreaded words: “interlibrary loan renewal request denied.”

“Somehow you must switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the words.” Richard Hugo

The Triggering Town was a game changer for me when I was starting out. This is the passage I always point out to beginners.

Announcing: Our Fall 2025 #WritingWorkshops! 😍 Discover a range of workshops exploring everything from playwriting and poetry to fiction and young adult literature. 👇 Learn more and sign up today👇 qwf.org/fall-2025-wo...

I AM GREATLY HONORED

To be online this week is to believe that you, too, must have — if only you search hard enough — a photo of yourself holding hands with, gazing admiringly at, standing bro-ily alongside of, listening like a disciple to, or lying in on-screen bed with Robert Redford. Grateful for his work and art.

One more by the late great Dean Young

New Absolute Units is live! Join special guest @katrinanavickas.bsky.social as we delve into the commons: the history of shared resources, the historical forces that encroached upon them, and the fight to get them back. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. merl.reading.ac.uk/explore/abso...

Kim Addonizio’s best volume yet (and they all knock it out of the ballpark). Each book gets more intense, more purposeful, more effortless, and more capacious than the last.

Micro-season: burdocks in the dog’s ankles.

Ekphrastic poetry prompt:

Yay for Montreal’s The Word Bookstore! I’m one of the profs who orders textbooks there. Love Adrian. He taught me the secret to removing yard sale price tags from books. Once I mistakenly emailed him an article about pigeons that was meant for me as poem research. The right wrong recipient, somehow.

“The deer are awake. Is one pregnant? If they kept diaries the first entry would read: Was born Was licked Tried walking” — Heather Christie from “Suggested Donation” in Paper Crown (Wesleyan Uni Press, 2025) 🦌📖

Jane Hirshfield

“One more anthropocentrist ruining the picnic for for everyone / Can’t we all just take off our helmets & be nectar in a bee-loud glade / Open the box, don’t open the box, ignore the box, the cat knows” — Kim Addonizio from “Therefore I Am Nothing” in Exit Opera (Norton, 2024)

Everything will break your heart these days. But some things sharpen all that everything into one thing.

New craft class coming up quick. I've dreamed of teaching this one for years! We'll explore the porous boundaries of investigative literature, from Gwendolyn Brooks in Montgomery to Lynn Nottage in Reading, PA., to Patrick Radden Keefe in Northern Ireland. Online + open to all, incl. all genres.

I'm reading tonight with Lectures Logos 2741 Notre-Dame West, Montréal, 7-9 pm. Guest readers are: Chanel Sutherland, stephanie roberts, Kelly Nora Drukker, Marlihan Lopez, Nathalie Batraville, Laura Doyle Péan and Uchenna Dike. There’ll be an open-mic session as well with spaces for eight  readers.

🎉It’s #CephalopodWeek! Our annual celebration of all things octopus, squid, and cuttlefish 🐙🦑 To kick things off: A new study looks into how octopuses use the suckers on their arms to “taste” harmful microbes on surfaces they touch. buff.ly/PhTxTnr

Extreme weekender diagonal bed use alert! 🚨

Now moving into the moon phase that is Leonard Cohen meets Emmylou Harris.

SO grateful to @sevendaysvt.bsky.social for sharing a 30th birthday playlist of Vermont bands! Can't wait to listen. It's also inspired me to track down music from older bands like Chin Ho!, Dysfunkshun and Pinhead (going waaaay back!). Check it out: www.sevendaysvt.com/music/musicf...

It’s a Leonard Cohen kind of phase of the moon.

Montreal: you, too — good moon. Same moon. Same good moon. Worth stepping outside for.

Does anyone have a folklore horror story rec? Hoping to use them to build a unit on folklore research: e.g. Golem, Wendigo, etc.

I don’t mean to be self-aggrandizing, but this endlessly meme-able image is in conversation with a little poetics essay I wrote this summer for @periodicities.bsky.social . Perhaps my only link to Tiger Woods besides fierce animal names? periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/08/sara...

There’s the book bereavement issue: not being able to move on from a book. Then there’s the counterweight joy: one book pointing you fiercely at another. Ash Steps (Lane) to Exit Opera (Addonizio) feels like a great reading journey. Somewhat overlapping concerns, radically different poetic voices.

I have an August poem, grown from many aches, the smallest of which is that I always miss the Perseids meteor shower. I meant to post it in August, but that’s 2 things I’ve missed. Here it is now. You can even listen to me read it. Thanks to @ex-puritan.bsky.social. puritan-magazine.com/revision/

Great thread. But for me the ideal ratio is closer to 25 or 30%. ;)

For you. Today.

I just turned some iPhone notes into a poem by typing on a 80s-era Olympia electronic typewriter. Absolutely transformative experience. People tell you it will be, but you can’t really know until you do it. Line, form, pacing, word choice: it changes everything. 🔥🔥🔥

One more from Marie Howe

“The conscious grace of animals (say horses, cats) composes their arenas. We, as well, inscribe our selves upon our space, interpret. Speech is our ekphrasis: life acknowledged, breath by breath.” — M. Travis Lane, from “Extreme Ekphrasis,” in Ash Steps (Cormorant Books, 2012)

Loved getting to review this great new novel by Helen Oyeyemi for the NYTBR! www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/b...

Some kind of necropastoral extension of a Wallace Stevens jar situation?

Here’s a simple truth as I see it: Gen-AI’s faux engagement with human experience makes it blasphemous. Writers are incensed not just about authorship, voice, and copyright, but because holding up the human condition by all of its ragged edges and hearts is an urgent, sacred act. Clergy: rise up!

When you are M. Travis Lane, you almost need not write poems because your section titles are this good. But of course you do write them, 82 pages of them, and nearly all of them are this exacting and transformative (from Ash Steps, Cormorant Books, 2012).

There are poems which, when you read them, spark admiration and envy in such strong and equal measure that your whole inner landscape collapses.

Imagine a monk saying this. (May we all rediscover our inner monks.)

Anaïs Nin.

Poem prompt.

Will always re-share Kay Ryan.