( via / via )

Arcade.

"Berryman once tried to provoke his mother into a confession, reserving for her a front seat for a lecture he gave on Hamlet at Princeton, in which he examined in psychoanalytical detail the play’s murderous family dynamics. Steelier than Gertrude, Martha rather brilliantly outwitted her son, leaving her seat vacant until he was well underway, and eventually making a dramatic entrance in high heels and a startlingly bright dress." —Mark Ford via

Pynchons ranked (with useful summaries). And Dickens.

"broken spigot"

shelves i never nudge
as the new thwarts chortle
taste of rye bread, rostrum
ruinous speech leechcraft

machines-breaking shockwave
funest shoptalk festers
in a slow moment slaughter
slesters the void's 'roid-rage

ricochet cathedral
stickleback bardsweat
nothing but pith cancer
appalls with moon-pinball

to crawl through this miremaze

"Their goal was not to co-opt Aboriginal culture or pass it off as their own but to enter imaginatively into the reality that the Australian landscape has its own metaphysics."

( via / me )

"...the power of fashion, yanked away from the platinum card, and put back in the thrift store where it belongs."

      "imperious shadow"

throat chakra goblin · Scriabin gust
   alone with quids · quacking dark
cannot solve inly · carping about
   in dim scrollops · skullcap quaff
to the blank morrow

The best albums from China in 2026... so far.

"To obtain the monkeys used in the climactic sequence, Herzog paid several locals to trap 400 monkeys. He paid them half in advance and was to pay the other half upon receipt. The trappers sold the monkeys to someone in Los Angeles or Miami, and Herzog came to the airport just as the monkeys were being loaded to be shipped out of the country. He pretended to be a veterinarian and claimed that the monkeys needed vaccinations before leaving the country. Abashed, the handlers handed the monkeys over to Herzog, who used them in the shot they were required for, then released them afterwards into the jungle." —@kentpeterson

"The North Pole is not where it used to be."

( via / via )

In Victoria's day one could be a respectable academic painter & still specialize in depicting see-through nighties.

"When the world came back steadied, in the big carred-up arena, tyres were still burning."
—Barefoot in the Head

Best "White Rabbit".

"pink world wrapped in salt clouds"

a bedrock wusp that all mild rhapsodies perjure
& even cynical mischief serves as vessel
seraph if stewed in this murk we fain would wrestle
questions out of Dante's lark & pitchfork-urger.
getting things done, the plaintive dog in the manger,
when all one wants is spraypaint on a trestle,
into bulleted tasks would shoehorn epistle
& murmur. cultivate the will to injure.

coal seams being slow to self-extinguish,
waiting on days that carry the lesser stigma
so tiny you could keep it in a matchbox
so vast it blots out even the blaze of anguish.
my burnished steering wheel discerns enigma
after enigma: one-off, flow & batch-mocks.

Scheherazade.

( via / via )

"The Masses are not mystified, the[y] have 'an explicit and positive counter-strategy', which is their complete destruction of meaning."

      god piñata

piece of the true cross · Pete Townsend whacked
   muggy as shit · we muggles
under stern pylons · pullulate steps
   eyes glued to screens · full of gloze
now the truck speeds up · clock's now heeded
   mackerel sky · amok grays
should i gather up · shards of pages
   stuck in this lane · blocked lewdly
crease of a prune toss · westerly tend
   ripples the pool · rain but raised
sing in the doldrum · you know the drill
   bodybags heap · block heaven
rotting from the top · terrible smile
   emptiness reached · into core
drive with myrmidons · in the same cars
   cobweb drooling · dreams of peace

Drab drubbing.

"By 1967, it had nowhere left to go but here: a rundown mansion in a town called Sleepy Junction, repurposed as the headquarters of an organization with the acronym M.O.T.H.E.R. — Master Organization To Halt Enemy Resistance — its three ranking agents played by men who, a generation earlier, would have been billed above the title in any picture they appeared in."
—Zachariah Malachi via

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

( via / via )

In Praise of Fractals.

"Yesterday was likely the hottest day in France since the last interglacial (125,000 years ago)."
—@nilsgilman

A Giant List of Virtual Museums.

bookkeeper

questions you once asked of me
in the long ago, in the long ago
before it all went south

asphault reckonings
one or two good days

Hannah and the Master.

( via / via )

On Sonnetizing.

worm's eye view of rot · doomscroll punchtape
   the wrong war falls · paltry dire
can't decide if it's · portrait landscape
   sad glaucous curve · allowed pyre
my worn tires scrubbing · a skew threshold
   my passage slow · slack tinchel
the groc'ries arrive · from WalMart reft
   a plague season · secretive death
worm's eye view of rot

            —the bard ruthless
   the book unread · vermin winning
in the olive pool · perfect inning
   sky, color of · cruel doulas
betweeen the channels · charcoal gray grief
   TV screen turned · twirl relief

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."

( via / via )

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.

( via / via )

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.

( via / via )

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.

( via / via )

"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.

( via / me )

🔥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."

( via / via )

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.

( via / via )

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.

( via / via )

"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.

( via / via )

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.