( me / via)

"[O]n the first day of ‘class’, they open up the course site in Canvas, or whatever other learning management system is in use. Then, they plug in their favored AI to the site to take the course for them."

AI Bots Stole My Music.

"The good host, after a dinner where much rice wine has been served, sees to it that his departing guests wear the same hats in which they came." —@harryskeeler.bsky.social

To the Old Gods.

( via / via )

"The fires were extinguished by morning, and Privoz did what it has done for nearly two hundred years: it resumed trading."

"Toad ran back to Frog.

'Frog,' said Toad, 'this kite will not fly. I give up.' "

—@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Makes me want to pick up a squeegee again.

Nowhere Man.

( via / via )

Stavropol.

"1381.

I suppose the time will come
Aid it in the coming
When the Bird will crowd the Tree
And the Bee be booming

I suppose the time will come
Hinder it a little
When the Corn in Silk will dress
And in Chintz the Apple

I believe the Day will be
When the Jay will giggle
At his new white House the Earth
That, too, halt a little—"

—Emily Dickinson

Pixel stovetop.

My inhuman parenting-experiment which i never got to try (no kids): have 7 nannies, one for each day of the week in order, each of whom speaks a different language. The child will grow up octolingual.

The Book of Resonance.

( via / via )

Rondeau of the good old days.

"Writing this kind of document with an uncritical use of constructs like 'superintelligence' and 'alignment' like they’re self-evidently reasonable ontological primitives (like say 'Sun' and 'Moon' for astronomy) rather than deep theological commitments (closer to 'Resurrection' and 'Transubstantiation') is either disingenuousness or an oblivious degree of religiosity." —Venkatesh Rao via

Best Venn diagram.

"Docking at Ezhou in the Evening
(written in the war years)

Through a gap in distant clouds
We see the walls of Hanyang
Like a sail floating
Could reach them in a day

The water is so calm
The merchants spend the daylight dozing
We only know the currents
By the calls of the crew at night

In the Xiang country
My grizzled hair turned to autumn
My homeward heart
On this long journey turns to the moon

Sometime during the war
My old farm and fields were lost
But far, far worse
Is the sound of drums by the river"

—Lu Lun via

Ca'canny.

( via / via )

The Thief of Bagdad (1924).

astir blue star garden
rust viaduct the vista
no-go left turn leagues now
lesson-davening pavement

What the Odyssey actually sounded like.

"I think we are watching confabulation, deliberate lies, and political spin merge into something indistinguishable." —Heather Delaney Reese

The handwritten issue of Keyhole.

( via / via )

"...he wrote a 42-page pronunciation and spelling dictionary for children, Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, published in Vienna in 1926, the only book of his apart from Tractatus that was published in his lifetime. (A first edition of the dictionary sold in 2005 for £75,000.)."

"Isaac Newton’s quote 'if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants' was later commemorated on the £2 coin, meaning that Newton simultaneously coined a phrase and phrased a coin." —@olliebray

The rabbits are still working on it.

"the black book of neville chamberlain"

High John Conqueror
lets stranded cars through
pale cerulean rollups
stopped at a railroad crossing
the drone peers
cannot see my heart

summer's majesty of harm
happens unremarked
bodies ferreted off
before the sun comes up
the drone peers
cannot see my heart

in all ways heretic
as the slow walls make approach
& sing
as you were taught to sing
the drone peers
cannot see my heart

Anastatic Printing.

( via / via )

"It is a feeling of failure, loss and despair which, when pursued to its nadir, can yield new insight, and possible new avenues of exploration or modes of expression."

we have achieved liftoff
in the starry veldt
a box for manticore phlegm
damp cuff
rusted cufflinks
you have to move
the tree

these idiot games
with desp'rate outcomes

"I think of Whitman every day."

"The glittering promises of individual wealth and technologically mediated comfort and pleasure have proved almost irresistible to many human communities, and when they haven’t industrial modernity has very often been forced on recalcitrant communities by violence." —Ian Marcus Corbin via

Hegelian pun in German advert.

( me / via )

Henrietta remembered.

"FRAILTY (Anagrammed Lines)

Language has this frailty:
a hasty sunlight — a fragile,
largely aghast, faith in us...."

—Anthony Etherin

Tornado with a rainbow.

antelucan rain-hour
antlered fistful of mystics
      fin'lly set
   atop Mt Surd
orange saucer · floor that is murder

Very noir alley.

( via / me )

Cross at Stratford.

without music · into mere labyrinth
   the shadow of the words

Champion of the giant anteater.

"What finally re-carved the ground was not a better grade of politician but a broad and sustained external forcing that took a generation to build and a generation to apply – the muckrakers who made the skim visible and then intolerable, Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil, Lincoln Steffens on the shame of the cities, David Graham Phillips on the treason of the Senate, and behind them a mass movement that turned disgust into structural law." —Bob Tow via

Friends of the Library Sale.

( via / via )

Our quarrel don't last for years.

"Just remembering watching Christopher Hitchens on FOX News with my mother right after Jerry Falwell had passed, when he said, 'If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.' " —@rufus-hickok.bsky.social

Swan landing.

Some dry deaths in the panoply of villains,
memes unfurl with July's bad share of parch.
As errands crawl, the Resistance sweeps like pitch

on a chrome shore the Human Centipede garlands.

August with mad cicada insolence beckons
nor are we hardly done with walls of burning,
who count the clouds our foes this fervid inning.
Epic, could clown articulate the circus;

comic, except for barbed wire at the margins...

With less than radar track what's more than missile,
Pilgrim; then pack it into toothsome parcel
till layaway fulfills the cave religion's
interiority of bear-fat pigments—
other dry deaths remain but cursive figments.

Iran is on it.

( via / via )

The Dictators.

"Thirteen Poems from My Southern Garden

6
Seeking a style, culling my phrases,
Grown old carving grubs!
At dawn the moon hangs in my blinds,
A bow of jade.
Can't you see what is going on, year after year,
By the sea of Liao-dong?
Whatever can a writer do
But weep in the autumn wind?"

—Goddesses, Ghosts, and Demons: The Collected Poems of Li He (tr J D Frodsham, 1988)

Ferris wheel in a TV cabinet.

"Flickering in the Pleiades meant trouble on the northern frontier." —Eliot Weinberger via

This tiny blessed sphere.

( via / via )

Buried Between Her Eyes.

"Strip back the rattling chains and the cold spots and what you find, again and again, is someone who wasn’t allowed to speak." —CJ Cooke via

"Taste is making aesthetic choices someone does not want you to make. Everything else is public relations."

"Parallelogrampire"

Pale cerulean this tense July
Fun mortality blossoms;
Riddlethwarts destroy
As debris counts the lessons.
Bicentennicide swift and clean
Mellows in the hell-machine.

No one saw where assassins waltzed;
Outlines stand or they seem to.
Pickpockets say it's all our faults--
Xmas lights on the lean-to.
Bicentennicide's Potemkin vibe,
Hoedown for a toxic tribe.

Fireworks and AI-targeted drones
Dance in the heads of vatniks.
Doctor's verdict spills on stones
Dealwise necromantic,
And manly bicentennicide
Mogs the day the music died.

"I keep a cup I have used for nine years. I have written about it before. But the cup is mine in a way Ryōkan’s bowl was never his. The bowl was held lightly enough to be handed to a stranger. Mine, I would chase down a thief for.

( via / via )

Tricola.

"Requiem for a Staunch Trumpist"

When the tale of all of this is told,
Some were reluctant knaves, and some were bold.

Rainfield and Argument.

"I have come to realize that no matter how badly the algorithms fuck us up, the internet is still the front line of the struggle between the DIY movements surviving from the 20th century and the commercialism of global tech corporations trying to dominate the 21st-century world." —Hana &Co via

A Hinge in History.

( via / me )

"The trouble is that Adams has been using the machine long enough that he feels dependent on it, even if he struggles to get it to work as he wants."

"I used to get quite a lot of these emails and I did indeed take part in book clubs, festivals and TV programmes about books. The difference now is that the clubs, festivals and programmes don’t seem to exist." —Christina Patterson via

Sugar.

      "subvortex"

Nights in July in Texas, never dipping
under eighty, the pool bathwater-warm.
Cicadas all day long thrash raucous hymn
   nastily carping.
July nights, their annulling
      humid clasp
nothing before mooring
   our cloistered drift;
lit windows · that were less views
than unkept promises & now too late—
Texas July trundles into Europe
on Panzer treads; nightmares sponge-envelope
   (cicadas assert)
while here (heavily) · a glow ebbs.

Register.

( via / via )

Hnefatafl. Or. And.

"LA GIOCONDA
Leonardo Da Vinci
The Louvre

Historic, side-long, implicating eyes;
A smile of velvet's lustre on the cheek;
Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies
Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest
Of cruelty that waits and doth not seek
For prey; a dusky forehead and a breast
Where twilight touches ripeness amorously:
Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skies
Of evanescent blue on cloud and creek;
Landscape that shines suppressive of its zest
For those vicissitudes by which men die."

—Michael Field in Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890's (1981)

"Been trying to figure out what it reminds me of and it's 'Main Street USA' at Disneyland."

"After this, and despite a long series of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sniping, they ['the Michaels'] converted to Catholicism, going so far in their zeal as to become Dominican tertiaries (lay sisters), though with a special dispensation that allowed them to continue attending the theatre." —David Wheatley via

Glasgow.

( via / via )

Carmel Point.

"My favourite part is a tie between the anecdote about sending postcards from his band’s New York tour to the Irish social welfare office, and his finding out a hallucinated group of pygmies due to a mushroom trip were, in fact, a tour group of dwarves coincidentally visiting the nightclub at the same time (!)." —Sam Enright

"The New Yorker, the prize culture, the MFA system, establishment criticism, the canon, imperial academics — these are not innocent bystanders to the suppression of the core and most vital American literary tradition, the suppressed people’s literary tradition, engaged literary populism."

"Spring View

The country is broken, though hills and rivers remain,
In the city in spring, grass and trees are thick.
Moved by the moment, a flower's splashed with tears,
Mourning parting, a bird startles the heart.
The beacon fires have joined for three months now,
Family letters are worth ten thousand pieces.
I scratch my head, its white hairs growing thinner,
And barely able now to hold a hairpin."

—Du Fu via via

Carolina Rain.

( via / via )

Beyond the Vessel.

"CROW (Palindrome)

Deft,
I saw a crow,
over us,
a sure vow or caw
as it fed."

—Anthony Etherin

Grover Leach.

"I will go to watch the animals, and let
something of their composure slowly glide
into my limbs; will see my own existence
deep in their eyes, which will hold me for a while
and let me go, serenely, without judgment."

—Rilke (tr S Mitchell) via via @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

"The wildly allegorical, unsolvable ending of The Prisoner...got him out of one phase of his career and into another. It’s a little bit like Lou Reed making Metal Machine Music or Prince becoming The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As..."

( via / via )

More than a Folk Song.

"My dad was a poet so I could never really join in when the other boys would argue about whose dad could beat up the other dads, but I was confident that my dad could make your dad feel seen in ways that would quietly devastate him." —@sjksalisbury.bsky.social

Night piloting.

oomphdip seldom suffered
      both coffees
scary-steep graph our faring
   occult downfall
if you stick to ixodids

overwarm morning
      my old car
most of whose char windows
   open nicely
the parkinglot lurk-fang'd

new summerhat gnomon
      drivethrough line
nestled in a chessgame
   faraway dreich

This fish doesn't swim.

( via / at the grand hotel )

Tagged crab report reward pin.

"CROWS (Anagrammed Lines)

The crows are back at the
weathercock that bears
a hawk.... Both trace secret
arches to the backwater,
to caw at the brash creek."

—Anthony Etherin

"...grad school takes our desire to dedicate our life to some sort of learning, fosters it, demands vows even of a monastic sort, then tells us there is no room at the inn—and, with great cruelty, and not a little bad faith, that it’s our fault.

"...real detonation but false report..." —Finnegans Wake

July Evening.

( via / via )

Eleven Dantes.

I too have always been baffled by this seemingly hardwired feature of our literary culture. I enjoy reading translated works in languages i can't read, like Russian. But i also have explored (to a limited degree) poems in two or three of their original languages & the difference is what i like to call "a cover song versus the original"... Literary culture requires generalizations it 𝑎𝑏𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑢𝑝, in most cases (unless the critic is someone like George Steiner). The alternative is having the humility to admit most of us aren't qualified to make the kind of sweeping critical judgments we would want to.

Caravans to Empire Algol.

boiling in the tar-pit
em'rald rain
vilipend neon lie
blinds drawn
ritual murder board
half empty

"Everyone talks about our cherry blossoms and sometimes our azaleas and magnolias, but Dos Passos is the first writer I’ve encountered to remark on the crape myrtles."

( via / via )

Rondeau.

turbid patch on the surface
appurtenances minces
      faint shadows
   shiv'ring hour
resume zither · lattice adding-to
hot pink sticky notes pelting
paragon of lawn trim

"Kingsnorth is wary of culture-war politics for good reason - though his book, in the end, cannot be read otherwise than as an intervention within it."

"...a continent that falls in love with Milan Kundera deserves to end like Atlantis." —Franco Moretti via

Movement Song.

( me / via )

San Francisco Girls.

"You must remember that because the mysteries come to an end makes them no less true." --Gore Vidal, Julian (1964)

"And when they reared, the elfish light/ Fell off in hoary flakes."

11.
Heorotweiler hailstorm
   sweetness now
hasten onnthe lacewing
   old bitterness
their house steep of staircase
   wandering lorn
the stuffed owl ending
   glass encased

12.
scribbled in stone · askew pylon
   choc'late affogado
along broken sidewalks · the play of photons
   Xmas in July is back

turbid patch on the surface

"Thus, if theōria is the faculty that perceives form or essence, and if both have been denied real existence in the reigning philosophy of the day, or at the very least, are depicted as ontologically suspect or epistemically illegitimate within a culture’s habit of thought (as is often the case today), then theōria is left with no proper objects to attend to as publicly credible realities."

( me / via )

Forty-eight hours of the Sun.

9.
small threat small evasion
smaragdine greenhorn
      some thin road
   of real traction
& the blood mist · gathers on gewgaws
not into a tartbook
attained through raindance
      educed though
   & river delved
the square filled · with a squamous mob

10.
deep cerulean
the drag gods
brick bared to
those gliding by

swirl of smoke
& no swimsuit
this hot spring
of harsh clinkers

missed future
all amercing
dragged to hell
by a small drone

"I carry my awareness..."

"I have just been reminded that Fritz Lang’s 'Metropolis' is set is 2026. Isn’t that fascinating? Someone 100 years ago thought the world be a stratified society with elites and worker slaves, pleasure places and religious figures driven underground…and artificial humans causing havoc for the human population in 2026?" —Sarah Light-Waller via

Night in July.

( via / via )

When you accidentally find your doppelganger on a painting made over 100 years old. 😀.

"Territory changes too fast to keep the maps up-to-date." —Catherynne Valente

Dusty Road in July.

7.
embossed ceiling balework
aboard tossing cosplay

the same terrible sirens
sulfur oblique weakness

fill up notebooks footfalls
feigned intricate bricktown

the odds taken irksome
by edge grayest sedgebrink

words fade to propelled Fillmore
fake ceiling or blue acorn

into the place plaints go

8.
   are the bombs falling
is that car shade burgundy
   this idle bubble
reached by driving an hour
keeping the computer mum

Brancusi’s Golden Bird.

( via / me )

"I long to scatter far and wide, in verse that will not die, the glory of great Oughtred."

5.
skelterfugue in skugry
askew winter bent twig
      sixty-eighth
   aileron swerve
in a white bathrobe · benthic sentiments
twilight twisting the mauve death
can't wait in this spate mist
      ahead course
   most recursive

6.
in the shadow of the hat fact'ry
an abundance of tictacs
i am king of tictacs
with my smart glasses
& my military presence

as close as i ever want to see
to a death drop for real

Girl with Pigeons.

"Maybe there's another army, invisible, even more invisible than ghosts, fighting over things we don't know and can't see, and they fill the ranks there. But we don't know." —Deathless

"As I picked up the heavy book, I knew terror, for I am that rarest of reviewers who actually reads every word, and rather slowly."