they are really good prompts y'all! I'm sharing them with my poetry students from last semester (who want to meet up and hang out and write?!) this weekend.

that on top of turning our classes into advising sessions and student success sessions and counseling sessions and how to read a document and use the LLM sessions and everyyyyyything since COVID has been quite a way to make me feel so gd useless and silly

I very much want VA to take back what Republicans did to our districts today. Vote yes, etc etc. BUT I am more tired of the ads that targeted every streaming service I opened--Republican PACS that continue to just outright lie about voting rights. The lessons in rhetoric continue in America.

Macro photo in portrait arrangement — a jaunty little click beetle faces the camera while perched, dare I say in an optimistic posture on some stucco. His antennae look like a series of triangles. He looks curious. Happy. Hopeful. One supposes this is because he does not have a cell phone and does not read the news. All he knows is being a cool bug and also clicking his entire body like a weird awesome dude any time someone tries to Kafka his ass upside-down. I wish I could do that. Getting out of bed in the morning would fucking rule. Photo by me, Chuck Wendig

Good morning instead of enjoying clickbait let’s enjoy this click beetle

In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.

—Frank O’Hara

Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels human language, study finds Analysis shows whales’ coda vocalizations are ‘highly complex’ and remarkably similar to our own

highly recommend the short video about clicks/vowels/linguistic research here
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

there's so much here that relates to things you've shared about writing and poetry and language and rivers!

@hanvanderhart.bsky.social I think you'll really like this essay

Language is a Fluid – Jake Skeets Featuring two pieces from his new collection, Horses, this new op-ed by Diné poet Jake Skeets explores how poetry sidesteps the failures of language when it doesn’t attempt to do anything.

"Language, however, is more a fluid. It morphs and changes. Even if I demand its rigidity and scripture-like authority, language finds a way to river and creek across the page, no meaning, all meaning, obscured meaning, clear meaning. I find the poem on a foggy morning in gray light. It comes..."

Perform an anti-ritual. Pick up whatever writing instrument you prefer: a pen, pencil, computer, notebook. It does not matter. Title your piece "shit" or "this is shit." Vomit whatever comes to mind—self doubt screeds, a sudden passage of beauty, the word "fuck" in ALLCAPS repeated 1000 times.

a little coral columbine flower garden behind a blue shed, with hostas and a camellia

Would you like to see my little native to VA columbine party area?

National Poetry Month: Prompt 16 from Zoë Ryder White May Swenson’s “Question” is one of those poems perpetually knocking around in my mind. Her questions focus on  the self unhoused from the body. While you are still embodied, what questions do you h…

National Poetry Month: Prompt 16, from Zoë Ryder White, featuring May Swenson’s poem “Question” 📚💙

@zoeryderwhite.bsky.social #poetry #NaPoMo

mRNA technology may be THE most underrated and unfairly scrutinized (fuck you COVID antivax crew) medical breakthrough in my lifetime.

Like... The things this is already showing it can do in the last 5-7 years is incredible.

best thing I am learning from Mamdani is to stay cheerful and keep going. Rage is tempting but it slows you down

Noah Wyle also banned cellphones on the set and brought in a lending library that everyone can contribute to. He said the background actors are the best read people in Hollywood right now.

You are who I love

You who the borders crossed
You whose fires
You decent with rage, so in love with the earth
You writing poems alongside children

You cactus, water, sparrow, crow You, my elder
You are who I love,
summoning the courage

—Aracelis Girmay

Always remember when these celebs start talking like this about AI, it’s because they are invested in it or the people paying them are. There was a $400k job at Open AI posted a few months ago to do precisely this, attract celebs to change consumer perception of their wildly unpopular product.

Whew dream come true to have all 3 of these faves together omg. BUT just want you to know I was warming up at the gym when we got to weighing 💩and I fell on the floor laughing WoW

I also noticed this week my university teaching account no longer gives me access to read articles anymore. I mean fine but?!

OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit

Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here

Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse

Media and universities: AI is here to stay

Now, you might say, "What about all the knowledge we'd lose if we push all the abusive geniuses out of academia?!"

But I'd counter and say, "Well, what about the knowledge we've already lost from the budding scholars whose careers they've derailed with their abuse?"

Did you know that Min Jin Lee, Marlon James, Deesha Philyaw, and Hernan Diaz ALL HAVE NOVELS COMING OUT THE SAME DAY? September 29, by the way. Fall books on my mind on an April weekend, sigh.

whew Richmond is a great example of this, but also turn using signals and waiting for pedestrians and 2, 3, and 4 way stop signs do the same here so

the ads about redistricting in Virginia paid by a Republican PAC are lying in the wildest way I've seen in a while

literacy is more than reading comprehension; it is also understanding how another person (the author) is inviting you (perhaps challenging you) to imagine another experience, perspective, life.

Every single one of the astronauts who went to the moon and back on Artemis II was educated at a public school.

Thinking of the teachers who poured into Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen tonight. You helped send a kid to the moon!

🌕 💛

For National Poetry Month I would like to invite people to go outside without a phone and notice when two things are trying to resemble each other. You don't even have to write it down.

So many of those asking where the student protesters are never ask them. They guess. Which tells you all you need to know about them.

The obvious answer here is that the student protest movement was broadly smeared as anti-semitic and aligned with terrorists, and a variety of institutions from government, media and the universities acted as if that smear was true, threatening, suspending, expelling and even deporting students.

Painting of a human figure in black shadow, positioned as if dancing or swimming in air, suspended among brushstrokes in yellow and pink & lilac & grey, suggesting the interior of the human body

The Foetus, created by Helen Greig, c.1966 in the art therapy studio at Netherne Hospital in Surrey, where she was compelled to live.
This is one of a small number of her surviving works, which explore themes of rebirth.
No biographical information about her is currently known to us