Let’s spill all the ink and let the Rorschachs rage protest. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Does the tinnitus of leaf blowing ever end?

You kept telling us. We kept looking in the wrong place. Thanks for your persistence. The ghost of last year's contest that has been haunting our website has now been exercised. Sincere apologies for that inconvenience. You can now visit HoCoPoLitSo.org for a no-ghosts go at entering the contest.

Are you the next Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize winner? We are looking forward to seeing your work! For all you need to know and to enter, visit: hocopolitso.org/2025/08/08/t...

Ross Gay comes to Columbia on November 7th.

America likes to be the best at things. These days it’s living up to that stature, being the best at being stupid.

The morals of corporate America are non existent. Profit over everything. And this isn’t even an important example. Use your imagination and scale up.

Two opportunities to see Safia Elhillo -- author of the acclaimed Bright Red Fruit -- for #FREE tomorrow on the campus of Howard Community College. 12:30 p.m. Monteabaro Hall & streamed via Vimeo (link below). 6:00 p.m. Monteabaro Hall All you need to know: www.howardcc.edu/discover/art...

That day we look around and find we are all human.

There's a book festival in Baltimore tomorrow. baltimorebookfest.com/full-stage-s...

New season of Wilde Readings launches Tuesday evening at Columbia's fantastic independent bookstore, Queen Takes Book (6955 Oakland Mills Rd E, Columbia, MD 21045). Featured readers and open mic. Starts at 7. We'd love to see you there.

Let's just call it by its full name, shall we: The Department of War on America, Peace, and Humanity. Who wants a peace prize only to go renaming things such? Nothing but a madman and his gathering of sycophant crusaders. We are in for it, folks.

In our latest issue, poet and essayist Molly McCully Brown unpacks the value of a creative writing degree, “Think of it in early readers accumulated: The one you’ll e-mail for the next thirty years with your earliest drafts and subject headings like ‘This may be very bad.’” at.pw.org/ValueOfADegree

Held annually in loving memory of HoCoPoLitSo’s co-founder, the 2025 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize submission window is now open. hocopolitso.org/2025/08/08/t...

“There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.” ― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

The pause and preen of a hummingbird, and then the explosion back into its hummingbird self.

Just saw Paul Revere galloping through the streets of Washington DC screaming out a warning to its citizens, "The Red Coats are coming! The Red Coats are coming...." after King Bozo's morning bloviation.

Watching America go nuts over the Cold Play & ignore daily atrocities this very country is participant in, well, that’s all anyone needs to know about US right now. We have transformed into a cohort of monsters supporting opportunist & powerhungry madmen. America, get your head out of Trump’s ass.

humidity and heat— quiet as their shadows, crows rising from a cornfield

In Hate we trust.

Wanting the same kind of @bsky.app attention as the catbird, a Carolina wren lands under my chair to chirp his case. A mocking bird takes them all on. Cooler air prevails, today, and the birds are on it.

Summer suet feeder and the catbird meows and meows to keep all away. Or maybe it is just the feral joy of having this other personality inside a cage of feathers. Meow. Meow. It's a noisy boast, but the suet and the morning seem to be his, a slant of sun pointing this out.

Oh, good grief. "Reading in public – not cool. Or at least “performative reading”, as it’s been dubbed on social media, is worthy of ridicule." www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Weatherchange and birdsong through the open windows.

The way an oscillating fan bullies the humidity this way, then that, this way, then that.

No one wins a holy war. All the gods know this.

Peace is such harder work than war. Leaders always cave to war, other people’s children and all.

Words can turn into poems themselves when a within word steps into view: colLABoration.

The air is full of insect hatches. A cloud of termites, perhaps, visits and moves along (am working at an outside table). How slight they are and yet they take on forests. Such a slow and clumsy energy at the moment. How so very many have set out, how few might survive this burst into the world.

There’s a pond out back with so many frogs. And they keep the chatter going, it’s like gossip screaming, but no meaning, all excitement and earnestness, but just the dark presence of sound/being. God, I hope the Universe can hear this over the constant sound of humans murdering each other.

Here's a thought: "Here's a thought: "Shakespeare would be writing for games today." Keep an open mind and read more in the link. www.theguardian.com/games/2025/m...

'Accidentally' fell into Donna Tartt's Secret History (was one of the myriad things within arms reach when I wanted to read anything but another student paper). Smitten and may have to move straight into and through the other two.

These times we are in. All you need to know to understand: Spurs win something (17th place). Wondering if had could been uglier. Probably not.

Lots to unpack here. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Lots of rain to listen to today. I'll volunteer. It's gentle for the moment, so the voice is a song of childhood afternoons and looking up from some silly, yet engaging adventure book to project more of the imagined onto a screen of out-the-window gray.

Yeah, this:

Looking up, a halo of buzzards circling in.

Could have/ought to have… listened to the wind all day.

so close to its shadow the black snake almost hiding

Meanwhile black snake at a window sent the cats into ancient versions of themselves. They still jitter, these hours later. What? Just a shadow without a body. It’s ok. It is. All the snake can do is shadow. And slither.

Might have reached my quota of human interaction for the year already. People suck like mosquitoes. Thunk.

The hawk all those crows are talking about. Can't even chill. Out on a limb and wanting nothing but still. The crows, from their distance, all noisy and mosey along. The hawk seems proud to be an annoyance, just present and hawkish, quiet and hardly flustered.

And the wood thrush is back on local airwaves as spring shifts to summer. Old friend, so good to hear you again. Nature’s ’constants’ help carry the carrying on on.

This Spring's gone green like it knows what it's doing, humidity starting to summer its way in. And the semester? One last class where the pencils wiggle over a page and then everyone looks up into what's next.

Marketing-ese is such sleaze: “Returning the HBO brand into HBO Max will further drive the service forward and amplify the uniqueness that subscribers can expect from the offering,” adding the reversal is “also a testament to WBD’s willingness to keep boldly iterating its strategy and approach”.

A seemingly eternal semester begins a final wind-down. Been in frantic gear for so long growing minds, not sure how to act. The gentleness of a two-day rain, its soft voice on a canopy of new leaves is helping. There's a world around that I have given too little attention. Now's again the time.

Jeez, April really is the cruelest month if you are one of those running a poetry organization (@hocopolitso, do follow). But what a month! As Edward Hirsch has been known to share, "I'm wildly over stimulated." Such a pleasant exhaustion.

I'll be in conversation with @onetruththomas.bsky.social this evening at Vantage Point. If you are in the area, drop in and have a listen to Howard County's inaugural poet laureate.

Are you or is anyone you know the next Youth Poet Laureate of Howard County? Submission window now closes on May 9th. Apply now: www.hocoarts.org/grant/youth-...