( via / via )

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On Sonnetizing.

Sunset at the Roman Forum.

"Today, a group of Texans who were protesting ICE activities at the Prairieland Detention Center last year were convicted of charges of terrorism and given unusually harsh sentences ranging from 50 - 100 years in prison." —Maia Duerr via

"Certainly I had no idea that he was the central figure in such a strong literary cult."

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Dictionary of the Khazars.

      "rasterbook"

mirage of the world · the rain shadow
   cerulean beach · balked crescent
muggy esplanade · artifact pile
   burnt timbers left · where time broke
graygreen hymnal raised · by ghost henchmen
   in the pages · permission

There is hardly a tradition in English as there is in Japanese of the jisei or “death-poem”, but Stevenson gets my vote for the best one.

   Was Wilbur a great poet? If Sylvia Plath was the preëminent poet of her era (as i do believe), then he certainly would feature among the most accomplished minor poets*. Is there any reason for this classification? I say a poet can write one or two poems that deserve to be remembered, & be a "great minor" (or just "minor" since that adjective conveys only my appreciation); a "major poet" is one who influences other poets (at the time or after death), & by whose presence the tradition afterwards is not the same. Lots of formal poets admire Wilbur (as Frost's urbane brother...). Did his having written change anyone else's work?

Now, if he had written more alliterative poems like "Junk" or "The Lilacs" (now 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒'𝑠 a Wilbur deep-cut), the poets of the Alliterative Revival could embrace him as a forerunner & i might be more inclined to reclassify him. But these are not the poems one thinks of in connection with his name.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

* Berryman & Lowell being right on the edge, fading now except for their handful of greatest hits, i think. --It's senseless to confine this to poets in English just from America. Put Wilbur next to Geoffrey Hill & compare.

Hotel Housekeeping: Summer Seasonal, 1969.

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Orson Welles' Don Quixote.

"Big Sadness doesn't want you to know this, but just quietly being in the presence of someone you love and who loves you in return is very nice, actually." —@lastpositivist.bsky.social

Needfulness.

"Keep Yourself at the Beginning of the Beginning

Please try to help me go to the joy that is trying
to go to the beautiful helpful helpful beginning
of the beginning of the very trying freedom
that we make our great great great light
that is nothing but the laughter that is
fooling us into believing that we go
to the trash bin that is your life
that become the treasures
that live in the bottom
of the bin that is
your life yes
yes yes
yes –
please
try to dive
down to the
beautiful muck
that helps you get
that the world was made
from the garbage at the bottom
of the universe that was boiling over
with joy that wanted to become you you
you yes yes yes – please try to go to the colors
that kiss you great great great person of the light
that is becoming you you you yes yes – please
try to keep yourself in the bottom of the bin
yes yes – please try to go to the kissing
muck that is very true to your life yes
yes – please try to meet me there
yes yes – please try to bring
your beautiful nothing
there yes yes"

—Hannah Emerson via

The Language in Which I will Die.

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Disintegration.

"SUMMER SOLSTICE AT STONEHENGE (Palindrome)

Sun!
In my halo,
open,
I mull its altar: All.

I plait its lost light.
I lag, emanating:
I lay a ray, align.

I tan a megalith gilt.

Solstitial pillar, at last illumine —
pool a hymn in us."

—Anthony Etherin

Rouen Cathedral.

"Toad looked at the ground. The seeds still did not want to grow. 'What shall I do?' cried Toad. 'These must be the most frightened seeds in the whole world!' " —@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

"What I do is me: for that I came."

( via / via )

"According to Nature, 20 of the world’s top 23 universities in terms of research prowess are now in China."

"America has the parts to build a car that combines capitalism’s horsepower with a welfare state’s seatbelts and air bags. We just don’t trust each other enough to ride in it together." —Scott Galloway via

"...ten ideas a minute, nine of them screwy, but the tenth a lulu."

magical chore marrow
munch cicalatide sudden
      rogue arrow

   the words redden
tintinnitis · in the night verge
clownfire olive urgent
only when dusk rustles
      quartz warden
   wailing garden
sweets grown · where the bee bustles
green expense is groaning

grilse of full-blown knowing
      bitterest
   bootstrap glowing

From the Parker Solar Probe.

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"Whitehead was born in 1969, the year that construction began on the World Trade Center’s South Tower."

"Davenport"

intrusive drottkvaett
dry visual allusions
annotate wet streets inly
baroque trumpet
esters tired of easing
fall in love with a heart
don't fall in love with a face
queue-remorseful & hurt
fall in love with a heart
back to the tepid waters of the sonnet
cracking rocks in search of amethyst
your ev'ry curse richly albatrossed
fall in love with a heart

Basilisk lizard running.

"Writing about the internet can be divided into three camps I think, 1) writing like Honor Levy’s which looks at it from within and uses its temporal language 2) the traditional realist novel with phones added 3) those which try to make poetic and metaphysical sense of the technological world we live in now. Here M John Harrison is situated, along with Ben Pester, Nicola Barker and Vladimir Sorokin, and oddly, very few other writers." —Camilla Grudova via

Saint Olga of Kyiv, who used sparrows as vengeful incendiary devices, is in the running to become a patron saint of killer drones.

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🔥surrounded by Grey-headed Albatross chicks.

"The novelist Mary Gordon, I recently read, begins her writing day by reading ten pages of Proust, somewhat the way Karl Barth used to play a Mozart recording before settling to theology." —John Updike via

Metal Father's Day story.

"police raid"

order reordered
till it might as well be chaos
& the lattice stays

the Seven
& the One that is Lost

The Abandoned Poet.

( via / via )

Greatest thrift store find of all time.

"alien truthers"

immense stolen music
murmur & pool turquoise
Area Fifty-Onesies
arcane grid of ironwork
algal enterprise hajj
bright cliffs of half-caste
immense nights of music
no pilgrimage back to

"Even the title is hard, since podpol’e is not an abstract 'the underground' or even a cellar but 'the space beneath the floorboards,' a place where vermin might live but not people."

"Journalism as a form of belles-lettres has become something that old people do." —Bruce Sterling via

"And yet it goes on. And on. And on. And on. For an entire year, taking us all with it into an abyss which cannot be exited but only traversed."

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Rosetta Stone birthday cake.

"In not acknowledging the reliance of modern technologies on such flows, we tend to think that their only social implications are in terms of downstream consequences, while ignoring that the very existence of those technologies is a manifestation of an abysmally unequal world order." —Anthony Galluzzo via

All Reason Departs.

      "El Niño"

upcycled trope · humor the robots
   over the radar pore
two puddles · from wet gloves hanging
   gone when we return

Await.

( via / me )

6 Vintage Japanese Covers for J. G. Ballard.

"Civilwarland in steep decline"

Untergang gaslighting
gurgle circling the drain
expensive caffeine fueling
fad, sessile obsessions

Franz Ferdinand the musical

A Tradcath Wedding.

"I wanted to get good at cryptic crosswords so if there ever was another Bletchley they’d pick me to break codes there."
—AV Marraccini

Bad Lilies.

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Magnolia Ant.

"Midnight, and the room unmakes us." —@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

Poem for Juneteenth.

"Advice to a Prophet

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close."

—Richard Wilbur via

Don't Blink.

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"At the time that fish was caught, a local biologist confirmed it was over 100-year[s]-old."

      "algae autogolpe"

fadinger thirst thunders
frayed thespian griot
      winds asphault
   between roofsome trees
Frutiger Aero · for a day & a half

plugged-in dongle drywall
drastic granular ceasefire

Should a Rabbit have a Name?

I used to recommend Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but i need to have reread it more recently than 1980 to be sure.

Be that as it may, the next book after that might be The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès.

This may be the second most important event of 2026.

( via / via )

Somoza Unveils Somoza’s Statue of Somoza at the Somoza Stadium.

"There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound ; for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist."

—Miguel de Unamuno, The tragic sense of life via @poeticoutlaws

Jar of Moles.

      "bolus"

kaiju hopscotch · hope festers
whipped cream in my coffee · in the killing dawn
i'm sure there are reasons · garage door
all the windows drawn · a weary cycle
inchmeal delivered · the long haul
described in scraps · a bard bundles
newsreels relish · & wild rumor
   in the chiming of the words

I do not even know how to caption this.

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Herman Melville, Customs Inspector Number 75, New York City, 1871.

shade pedigree shrapnel
insure amber durance
between dog & superglued gilt
gunmetal clink welkin

slumberweed thing-drizzle
watchful with tart hurdles
breeze-moved curtains yielding
shade pedigree shrapnel

"And the rebuilt Temple will not be the same as the one destroyed."

"[Twin Peaks dwarf, backwards voice] That dark brandon meme you like is going to come back in style" —@rmhaines

"We have arrived at a place where the absence of colour is considered sophisticated and the presence of it is considered chaotic."

( via / via )

"Close reading always struck me as the drums in a free jazz trio: they might be holding something essential together, or they might not be there at all — you can’t always tell, and that uncertainty is the whole problem with the drums."

"Carl Johnes was working at Columbia Pictures in New York when his boss asked him to go over to Joan Crawford's apartment. ...She knew she wanted to give away some of the books...but she didn't have a clear idea of which ones to keep. ...The Rod McKuen and Jacqueline Susann books struck him as expendable, but she snatched Susann's away from him saying, 'She's one of my dearest friends!' " —Scott Eyman, Joan Crawford: A Woman's Face (2025)

The Six Great Elements.

"learning new systems"

big moth crushed under thin rain
burning oil refinery
talking philosophy
with my pencil sharpener

talking philosophy
with my pencil sharpener
deft footstool softener
as effigies atrophy

deft footstool softener
as effigies atrophy
big moth crushed under thin rain
burning oil refinery

Papa Was a Rollin' Stone.

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Harris, We Have a Problem.

"cupola"

fill bags & never empty them
silence of the rain
car headlights through gauze

this telescope
for the far side of the moon

Cathode Heaven.

"Did everything that had magic have teeth?"

—Catherynne Valente, Deathless (2011)

"That month I rented a sharecropper’s cabin at Tallahatchie Flats, off Money Road. Grey clapboard, tin roof, a bare bulb and a box fan. The floorboards spoke mouse and cottonmouths held the lease on the shade beneath the porch."

( via / via )

"All the principal participants in this episode emerged with great fortitude and with sanity intact, with the exception of Grothendieck himself."

"AGIs might become more capable of changing our values than we are capable of changing AGI values." —Forgotten Languages Full via

"The promise of lore is that of a web that sprawls endlessly, thus allowing readers to discern the equally endless nodes of connection contained therein."

"In Occupied Shuttilon"

1.
jagged white line
circusy classical
another
another

Parnassian switchblade

2.
so far up the mountain
it just struck me how far
good luck & bad luck
from here
nothing matters from here
& there's decades more of climbing
& you will never reach the top

3.
voice swallowed by echoes
cold feet in wet socks
rosary of waiting rooms
& the far off fall of demons

dressed stern in the worst way
second guess my choices
why hustle a croissant down
it may rain all day

these rooms that are borrowed
makes them most of all my own
black coffee like an edict
you return to your book

"This dichotomy between an unsettling, hostile future and an eerily comfortable past coalesces in the aesthetic category known as ‘dreamcore'."

( via / via )

National anthem.

car without wheels
up on cinderblocks

one thunder revvs before the last has lapsed

Many such cases. I had a broken plastic hose on my car that ended up costing $500 because it confused the onboard computer my car didn’t need & i had to get someone from the dealership to reprogram it. We had to get an entirely new washer because the slight vibration it developed from being off-balance confused the computer in it that it didn’t need & there was no way to reprogram that one.

Imagine a whole civilization constructed on this basis. That might be the explanation for those mysterious jungle megalith complexes where everyone just up & walked away from it one day.

Count your fellow passengers’ eyes.

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"There’s very little money in actually selling product."

"And the citizens, denied every word, invented an animal: the grass mud horse, a noble mythical alpaca whose name in Mandarin is a perfect homophone for 'fuck your mother,' which spawned songs, plush toys, nature documentaries about its battle with the river crab (homophone: 'harmony,' the official euphemism for censorship). The people built a fake zoology with one entry just to say the sentence on the parchment. The state banned the alpaca." —@terminallydrifting via

"The civilisation that could have given rise to an American Homer was wiped out when the settlers arrived."

only for the antler
ergot, fatidic burgle
dun skies over scaffold
skidmarks, plague-ridden
& we have the records
      the air thick
   with coming storm
in the old songs · not enough blood left
   on green neon walk

"Sisson is very good on how the making of a translation is the most attentive kind of reading one can do; but that most fully successful importations of a style or tone or form from one language to another are found not in translations themselves, but in imitations of various kinds, even if their success is rooted in the practice of translation."

( via via / via )

"Becoming a skilled and rigorous reader is a life’s work, informed by one’s own reading and experience, by the example of others, and by one’s character."

      "beautiful wrecked slalom"

legended · narrow stairway
      we crept up
   to my black sheets
fremd festival hosting
fastness holy pastime

scroll forward · a Saturn streel
      what's this land
   whelming toxic
steeple sealed with plywood
Plimsoll at skull ullage

ultracrepidarian bard
      wends his way
   to a black cup

The Scent of New-Mown Mayhem.

Oldsters who want physical media are like the last underground.

Going to California.

( via / via )

Commentary on Dictée.

This is a record i had to listen to over & over, with dawning recognition of its beauty & power. At first, i didn't even like it (& i listen to a lot of way-out stuff). I would say, a lot of free jazz depends on momentarily creating cadences which are played with & then mutated--or discarded--& it's not that hard for a practiced listener to recognize them in real-time. But with this record, Coltrane is not working with cadences but with textures & clashes of textures. He's utilizing implications & absences, & it's the knowledge of his deep foundation that is what grows on you with every further listen. Poets who are wedded to the unspeakable are occasionally allowed a place in poetry, painters make a fetish of their love of mysteriousness, but musicians who go to the same place only get a sad, knowing smile from "musician's musicians" because if this is also music, everything they've spent a lifetime learning is—wrong. via

Writing Self Writing Nation.

      "Gregg"

Mallalieu y l'Age d'Or
malfunctioning garage door
      tramped down path
   to the blue pool
absent · its sometime guests
watching the world · wake up from history
      watching out
   days of Hormuz
& mine sweeper grim

Previously Unpublished Works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

( via )

"Who are the great divagators of literature?"

   woodsmoke & dovesong
Venus & Jupiter vie
   step high in grass lush

Computer Hacking Documentries Mega Collection.

"I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams - like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves."

~ Hermann Hesse via @poeticoutlaws

Journacide.

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Maska. ☆☆☆☆☆

"Like building a maze as you go while at the same time getting lost in it."
—@jacobwren.bsky.social

"I had thought myself frail..."

      "wizardly impetus"

between dog & · wolf, twining
thread of light · alone where
      fluorescents
   softly bicker
passage to put back things

perishing thesh hour
static as the stone · on your own grave
      did you think
   the world would not
dodder on, amsace

between dog & wolf

"Over the last years, the annual festival in Kortrijk has become a real-life meeting hub for an otherwise decentralized online community."

( via / via )

"This was the console where, for 40 years, hundreds of thousands of slips of paper had been inserted into cardboard cylinders then sent up or down in pneumatic copper tubes in the stacks, 17 floors at its peak."

   clearer the garble
pages whose reason has fled

   button on the wall
& a code to keep up with

the cough no named intruder

The church will be finished in 2034.

"In 1950s Tokyo, an imported jazz LP cost 3,000 yen at a time when the average monthly office salary was 20,000 yen. The jazz kissaten was the solution to that arithmetic.

Japan's jazz kissa trace back to a single establishment: Black Bird, which opened near Tokyo University in 1929, playing Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong on an Electrola phonograph for students who had no other way to hear American jazz. By the mid-1970s, roughly 200 kissaten operated in Tokyo alone and around 600 across Japan. The typical room is dim and compact, stacked with vintage American audio equipment: Altec speakers, McIntosh amplifiers, Thorens turntables. More than 90 percent of these establishments still play vinyl.

The defining practice was silence."

—Michael Daniels via

"...in a single moment, diffused, profuse, complete and distant..."