I’ve been reading the Summer/Fall issue of THINK, and it’s excellent, with great work by @maryanncorbett.bsky.social, Dan Campion, Steven Knepper, Jesse Keith Butler, and others. Here’s one of mine:

Palindrome I am AI.

Smartphones clearly make kids read less, but the story isn't over: open.substack.com/pub/ericcolb...

I am pleased to have a poem in the new issue of The Hooghly Review, just out today. The poem's about aging parents; my own aging parents are quite lively and sharp, but looking ahead, we are all going to decline--if we're lucky! thehooghlyreview.com/issues/ficti... (p. 27)

Happy to see my poem about a great Bertha Wegmann painting up today at the wonderful Ekphrastic Review: ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrast...

Yesterday some friends and I protested! open.substack.com/pub/ericcolb...

Happy to see my poem about a great Bertha Wegmann painting up today at the wonderful Ekphrastic Review: ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrast...

Deep human conversations are good: open.substack.com/pub/ericcolb...

I think we should all give money to my old friend Lu Yoder’s project of installing solar panels on houses in Vieques. Lu runs an incredibly lean, efficient operation, so any money you give is going directly to replacing gas generators with solar. gofund.me/822bba004

Any ideas, @crschmidt.net, on how I can get my radmission’s battery to charge again? I plug the charger into it and… nothing. (The charger light remains green, as if the battery were fully charged, even though it’s nearly dead!)

#PlanetaryBoundaries - a new high score on number exceeded - 7/9 - is extraordinarily bad news www.theguardian.com/environment/...

So how much is the inability of the Democratic Party to mount any challenge to a hateful lying unAmerican would-be dictator related to the fact that telling the truth would mean admitting we are in a disastrous climate doom spiral?

I am upset about the outrageously unconstitutional shit that is happening in my neighborhood.

It would be so great if phone bans in schools actually boosted the reading of real books: open.substack.com/pub/ericcolb...

Gardeners only:

Students tell me their phones are more distracting than other teenagers are: open.substack.com/pub/ericcolb...

A couple of wasps in our screened-in porch in vermont (I think they get in through some holes a bear’s claws made) are reminding me of that wild passage in Letters From an American Farmer about hornets— one of many examples in the book of supposed harmony with nature:

Very happy to have a poem in the excellent new issue of pulsebeat poetry, out today (if you’re reading on a phone, turn it sideways!): pulsebeatpoetry.com/pulsebeat-12...

Lovely poem:

Nice sunflowers from my garden plot:

Draft #sonnet about sitting by a pond last weekend at my friend's camp in Maine:

Good news from the first week back at school: kids seem to be on their phones less! open.substack.com/pub/ericcolb...

AI is terrifying, but I'm not sure it will be so terrible for schools; it's pretty clear what we should do about it, and my colleagues, I'm glad to say, seem to be doing the obvious. open.substack.com/pub/ericcolb...

This schoolyear, I'm going to be keeping an online journal (a web log, a... blog?) about teaching reading and writing in a thoughtful, human-centered way. Mostly to help me clarify things in my own mind, but it might be interesting to others, too. open.substack.com/pub/ericcolb...

Happy to be marching in this Labor Day parade with my union brothers and sisters:

I have a painful #sonnet about my late beloved little brother up at Libre — it starts like this (read the rest at librelit.com/2025/08/27/e...):

North Beacon St protected bike lane was absurdly full of trucks today—riding down it, I saw a UPS truck parked in it (no photo), two trucks driving over bollards as they pulled into it (photos 1 &2), a moving truck and 2 private SUVs parked in it (photos 3&4). It wasn’t easy for me to get past them.

This is more or less the position I have been taking for the last couple of years: community, discussion, writing on paper in class, keeping screens mostly out of the room: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...

Hastily scribbled draft #sonnet on the last day of our vacation:

“In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read – and they have been many, big, and heavy – I don’t remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.” — Charles Sanders Peirce

Memorizing some poems with my wife on our vacation, and today we did Auden’s “Look, Stranger” (memorizing was easier because I’d read it a million times long ago), and wow—I love it!

Enjoying the flags at this PEI potato farm (Canada, PEI, Ukraine):

Every trees’s a lesson in confession: the bark wears scars and all the leaves foretell their fall.

…the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. (Sunset and sunrise!)

Tfw the label on the shampoo bottle in the summer cottage is in Greek and you haven’t been to Greece for 15 years…

Great to be back in PEI at the old family cottage above the bay:

Last year Blue Unicorn published my translation of a typically unpleasant but brilliant Baudelaire poem. I don’t think I ever put it up on social media, so I’ll post it below. You can buy a copy of the excellent issue, or subscribe, here: blueunicorn.org/product/blue...

I like this idea—ride a bike!

Was looking through my college newspaper archives from the year I graduated to see if I could find some stuff I wrote, and instead I found the road not taken:

Great to get the proofs of the new issue of THINK Journal, with great new poems by @maryanncorbett.bsky.social (I love the one about the moon!) and lots of others...

Yesterday I helped an old friend work on a cabin he’s building; it was fun, and we got a lot of the roof work done—but also we used a nail gun and I learned that framing nails shed little plastic scraps that hold the nails together, so thousands of tiny pieces of plastic go everywhere. Yikes!

This article is pretty gripping, and reminds me that plastic is absolutely everywhere. At the wonderful community garden where I have a plot, most gardeners cover their whole plot with plastic “cloth”, with their crop plants growing out of little holes here and there… www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/o...

Very happy to see my strangely discursive poem about AI in the new issue of The Madrigal. The first several lines are in the image; to see the whole thing, click the link… themadrigalpress.com/post/an-intr...

Today’s poem at Autumn Sky Poetry is just the kind I like: autumnskypoetrydaily.com/2025/08/02/s...

Ominous headline I am choosing not to click on:

New housing is good, actually: www.pew.org/en/research-...

Had a visitor:

Just read @j-tkelly.bluesky.social’s new chapbook, and my favorite of the many brilliant poems in it is this one (“…you find yourself looking appreciatively at the cemetery alongside the highway — and you're not even out of Ohio.“):