iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 26/03/2026

"Ignorance" in New Orleans.

Detailed stone carving of a dog/wolf figure in sandstone

030

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 26/03/2026

Don't lose your place.

191

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 04/03/2026

"These intimate poems are filled with vulnerability, longing, hope, and resilience. They honor queer devotion as a force capable of healing hearts and transforming history through a practice of tenderness rooted in the belief that love can be both sacred act and quiet revolution."

010

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 04/03/2026

Happy to share the cover of my new book of poems, Celestial Fire: Songs for A Love That Dares, officially out from Beothuk Books in April but appearing at Saints & Sinners in NOLA at the end of the month. Book description below. #poetry #gaypoetry #queerpoetry #lgbtpoetry #latinopoetry #latinxpoetry

Rectangular cover of a portrait oriented book of poems featuring a white banner centered in front of a vibrantly multicolored abstract watercolor. The title of the book, Celestial Fire: Songs For A Love That Dares, is centered in bright red letters on the white field. At the bottom of the cover in white letters against the watercolor are the words, "Poems by Dan Vera"

271

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 25/02/2026

Star-shaped lights above the table where we met to share poems. A photo memory from the first year of the LGBTQ Poetry Fellowship at the Arts Club of Washington in 2023. So happy that this project has continued with other poets! #dcpoetry

View from below of a five-pointed lighted chandelier against the background of a white ceiling.. geometric and sparkly.

040

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 25/02/2026

Anyone needing MORE words for last night’s hideous #stateoftheunion (it's almost like @grandiloquentwords.bsky.social planned their words for this week to help us all out!)

Three recent pages from the Grandiloquent Word of the Day calendar, featuring the words Twaddle, gombeen and inaniloquent. Twattle is a verb meaning "to talk much and idly; to gabble, to twaddle." Gombeen is a noun for "A mean, underhanded, corrupt person; usually applied to politicians." and an adjective meaning "corrupt, shady, underhanded." Inaniloquent is an adjective which means "Given to talking insanely; loquacious; garrulous."

020

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 10/07/2025

search drinks in your camera roll. Random 4. I recall #1 as a tasty cortado from Oak Cliff Coffee and #2 being a concoction we named “Scalia’s Tears“ after a good SCOTUS ruling (those were the days).

4 Photos of drinks including an espresso cortado and three fancy cocktails.

030

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 10/07/2025

We just had your weather down here in DC and let me say I'm glad you're not flying in this. It is SEVERE! Hope you get home soon.

210

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 07/06/2025

Jewels of Strawberry High Season in Pennsylvania. Bought these 2 quarts from a kid *literally* just walking out of the 🍓 patch. #strawberry

A hand holding two quart containers filled with ripe juicy red strawberries above a background of green hostas.

040

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 03/04/2025

Came back from #AWP25 with a number of new books including Didi Jackson's "My Infinity." It was a real pleasure signing with her at the @redhenpress.bsky.social table, but today I've been enjoying her numinous poems. Even read a few aloud to the husband (always the mark of a good book IMO).

Book cover for Didi Jackson's My Infinity, with the Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint's painting, "The Dove No 3 Group IX" (1915).

070

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 31/03/2025

Happy National Poetry Month! Don't miss this great reading April 22nd celebrating the landmark Library of America “Latino Poetry” anthology. Honored to read with three other poets from the anthology incl. @alexlregalado.bsky.social @moralesjuanj.bsky.social @acevedowrite.bsky.social! #poetry

Poster for the national poetry month Latino poetry: places we call home, anthology from the library of america. Including photos of the four readers. Reading will include a panel discussion. Tuesday April 22nd at 7:00 p.m. at Martin Luther King Jr memorial Library in downtown Washington DC.

040

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 07/03/2025

Wisdom on the power of hospitality and the dismantling of the prejudiced world. #wisdom #sunbeam

Hospitality means we take people into the space that is our lives and our minds and our hearts and our work and our efforts. Hospitality is the way we come out of ourselves. It is the first step toward dismantling the barriers of the world. Hospitality is the way we turn a prejudiced world around, one heart at a time. Joan Chittister

060

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 05/03/2025

Richard Osman @richardosman1.bsky.social has a great point about Adrian Brody's bloated Oscar speech and the undervalued power of screenwriting in Hollywood.

010

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 28/02/2025

Trollope writing in 1883 on the "certain class of dishonesty" fits perfectly with our current period, its normalizing of dishonesty and corruption and the willingness of people to go along with it, to celebrate it, to empower it. Trump and Musk enact it, Bezos and Zuckerberg cosign and cover for it.

Nevertheless a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now. Anthony Trollope in 1883 on what led him to write The Way We Live Now

052

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 21/02/2025

Reading Charles Godfrey Leland's memoir (1898) when I come across his retelling of Horace Greeley's warning about wealth and the country. I can only imagine they'd be staggered and horrified by Musk and the other techno Robberbarons.

Image of text from an old book, with the following highlighted: "Tell him not to get too rich — bad for the constitution and worse for the country. Any man who has more than a million is a public nuisance."

010

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 14/02/2025

"The best a poet can hope for..." Stanley Kunitz has it right here. And it's this kind of humility that made him so beloved a poet. #poetrysky #writingadvice #writingcommunity

“The best a poet can hope for
is to be remembered for a while,
to pass from one generation into
another, to have some young
person in another age open to a
page and say, “How beautiful!”
or “How true! He must have
been like me.” Stanley Kunitz

040

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 12/02/2025

Wrote this poem about our first dog Roofus (Wagsright natch). @kimroberts-dc.bsky.social published it in Beltway Poetry (which she founded & edited). Was reminded of it tonight when neighbor/friend @susanscheid.bsky.social sent me this picture of her dog in the snow! #dogsofbluesky #poetry

3133

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 11/02/2025

Used Bookstores are a kind of magic. For example, I was telling a friend about finding poetry books once owned by @cphillipspoet.bsky.social --one in @leftbankbooks.bsky.social in STL, the other in @halfpricebooks.bsky.social in Texas! A kind of strange used bookstore curation I really love! (1/3)

A well-lit, used bookstore, this one Dog Star books in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Photograph depicts a large room with high ceilings and rows of tall wooden bookshelves filled with books with different colored spines. Two people stand looking at books on the shelves. At right there's a floor to ceiling book-shelved wall with eleven rows of books and a very tall wooden bookshelf ladder,

250

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 11/02/2025

Snow's REALLY coming down now! Makes me really miss having a dog. This was 2016 and Blossom really loved it!

0100

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 11/02/2025

Here in the states you can SIT on Pasternak's bench at VCCA, the artists and writers residency in Virginia.

Photo of a large cast-iron and wood-slatted bench in a park-like setting.

110

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 09/02/2025

As for the big Superbowl, here I stand.

Me exultant with both arms spread wide on a Vermont mountaintop with the caption, THIS IS ME NOT GIVING A SHIT ABOUT FOOTBALL!

171

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 04/02/2025

"Without community, there is no liberation." Audre Lorde

0112

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 03/02/2025

"37 Beauties & the Clarity of the Blue Sky" A wonky log cabin meditation piece-work for my friend Sharon who had a hell of a week. I replaced the traditional center red (🔥) block with a patch of sky. Ringed it with scrap blocks representing some of the beauties of the world. #quiltsky #meditation

A square-shaped piece of quilting with small blocks of colored and patterned fabric, some with animal and botanical designs, surrounding a square panel with a white fluffy cloud in the sky at the center.

190

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 31/01/2025

This morning in my quote book, I came across Dorothy Thompson's warning. She was a courageous journalist who Hitler expelled from Germany for her writing on the frothing-at-the-mouth Nazi cult.

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say ‘Heil’ to him, nor will they call him ‘Führer’ or ‘Duce.’ But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!’”
Dorothy Thompson (1935)

085

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 28/01/2025

The Cuban poet and democratic freedom fighter José Martí, born on this date, with a word on lighting the oven. He spent a lot of his life in exile, mostly in New York City. Note how he's not baking the bread here but lighting the oven so others might bake.

We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it. If I survive, I will spend my whole life at the oven door
seeing that no one is denied
bread and, so as to give a
lesson of charity, especially
for those who did not bring
flour.
José Martí

051

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 27/01/2025

Sontag on the "better standards of justice and of truthfulness" as a duty in writing. #writing

A great writer of fiction, by writing truthfully about the society in which she or he lives, cannot help but evoke (if only by their absence) the better standards of justice and of truthfulness that we have the right (some would say the duty) to militate for in the necessarily imperfect societies in which we live. Susan Sontag

010

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 26/01/2025

Some really thoughtful and valuable insight here from @billmckibben.bsky.social about understanding the historical moment we're living in and how we can organize and respond: substack.com/home/post/p-...

"We need to figure out how to leverage those facts in the years ahead—creatively, in ways that make use of our advantage in truth and beauty and minimize our current lack of political power. That’ll be part two, and it may come with an assignment!" Bill McKibben

150

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 25/01/2025

DC's literary community is mourning another loss, first Myra Sklarew, now the bohemian force of nature Elisavietta “Lisa” Ritchie who was one of the early leading lights of @wwph.bsky.social Here's a poem of hers. For more about her see www.washingtonwriters.org/in-memoriam/ #poets #dcpoetry

Photograph of Elisavietta "Lisa" Ritchie set alongside her poem, "Advice To A Daughter".
In the photo Ritchie is lying on the ground amidst fallen autumn leaves reading an open book.
Her poem, "Advice To A Daughter," reads:
Do not gnaw chicken bones before
a lover, I tell her, as we crunch
the cartilage of a hapless hen.

Could put him off, give rise
to thoughts you might have
taste for more than skin.

My lover is so meticulous
he uses knife and fork,
misses deep pleasures.

I have to sneak to the kitchen,
chew both our drumsticks clean
before I scrape the plates.

The best is what some call
the parson’s nose, others term
the pope’s, the rabbi’s.

My mother said: What scuttles
through the fence the last
is surely the most succulent.

So while our chicken stews apart
you and I retrieve the bubbling bone
gnaw, and juices trickling down

our chins, weigh the risks of loss:
either a fastidious lover
or the choice parts of a bird.

040

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 24/01/2025

4-year old ink sketch of our dog Blossom sleeping alongside a litany of (largely) made-up Spanish nicknames for her. Five months since her death and still miss her dearly. #dogsofbluesky #blueskydogs #sketch

060

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 24/01/2025

I had no idea about this place Jonathan. Thank you for sharing. I was moved by the endemic tiger beetle too!

Close-up photograph of a small beetle on a pink sandy background.

000

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 18/01/2025

Harriet Monroe on making enemies has some serious María Félix energy here and I'm here for it.

Black and white photograph of iconic Mexican actress María Félix wearing a stylish hat with a large brim. Her expression is sure and compelling with an air of quiet fierceness.

040

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 17/01/2025

Detail of Kimberly Bush's "Migration" in silk, wood, and thread -- this amazing hand stitched sachiko art piece I saw last year in Northern Virginia. Part of a group show of these fiber artists in Upstate New York who worked in community during COVID. #art #fiberart

Closeup photograph of a hand-stitched artwork composed on dark brown wool fabric with detailed stitchwork in white and red thread. A medallion of sorts in white with a red cross is at the center of the piece.

050

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 14/01/2025

Portrait of young artist with cracker and gladiola. Mercedes, Texas. Circa Olden Times Wrote something up about this image and as I struggled with word count it quickly bent itself into a poem and out of this post.😉 First new poem of the year. I can only say it has the word "corm" in it.

Photo of small boy about two-years old in a white shirt and dark blue jumper. He's wearing black socks and black shoes. His hair is cut short as he faces the camera smiling. He is outside in a garden, holding what appears to be a cookie or cracker in his right hand while his left hand holds the blooming stem of a gladiola plant.

160

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 13/01/2025

Philip Levine from 1996 is damn prescient: (this is from the Albany Writers Conference that year)

Quote from Philip Levine at the Albany Writers Institute in 1996
"I still believe that essentially, what governments have done to us, especially a government so totally bought as our own, is to separate us from each other, to blind us to the fact that we are a single entity. And make us think of each other as very different and competing for what there is here. And they’ve fostered that on us. We bought it. You know, like the Nixon strategy for gaining the South, well, “I’ll use anything to make white people think black people threaten them and their jobs,” etc. I mean, you see it? I saw it as a child. I still see it, but I’ve partly lost my faith in the American people that if they’re told the truth about the nature of their life, their lives, that it will have any impact. I think a great many people hearing the truth say, “Oh, yeah, but I still want my BMW," or "I’ll be an anarchist just as soon as I get that BMW and that terrific stereo set,” and "blah, blah blah.”

050

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 10/01/2025

Anita Bryant is dead. Paraphrasing Christopher Hitchens on Jerry Fallwell's death, "If they give [her] an enema, they can bury [her] in a matchbox." Most don't remember Bryant, but I'll remember her as a smiling charlatan and grifter who spent her life demonizing innocent people.

050

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 01/01/2025

What about the undated evergreens?

Serious faced yellow Labrador dog sitting in a lawnchair that is half submerged in flood waters. Text reads "it's going to be okay but it's going to be different.

110

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 30/12/2024

Adding to my earlier post about the death of poet and teacher Myra Sklarew: It’s damned hard (and unfair somehow) to choose a poem by a poet whose work you so admire, but two from her book, The Science of Goodbyes. Here's Sklarew's "If You Are Willing"

If You Are Willing by Myra Sklarew

This language You once owned it
It can be opened again You need
only untie the words letting the frayed edges
fall away and the sounds will take up residence
again on your tongue For isn't it so that
words bring their own genealogies
offering their version of this world

And you reach in taking them
between your fingers as you did
in childhood the invented creatures you pocketed
who ate their way all night
through your own terrible loneliness

Kneeling into the darkness let
what is without form materialize
in you These broken pieces
hands that will come to you there
Dark going out to meet dark
or some thread pulling in
the silence drawing you on
And you move in it like water
Your body swims out to it if you are willing
enough and the bright shapes take form
opening inside you

262

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 30/12/2024

The Goodbye by Myra Sklarew
This endsaying-moon pried loose by grave force, pulled out of earth's sweet atmosphere- this has been formulated in every place. In each text it is known.

At birth, the broken covenant with before-parting from it hand over hand along the dark way, or valve closing on its nine month work-breath in the place of blood.

Or in sleep it rises like a ghostly glacier bounded on each side by consciousness; it calls us and we go at night to that kindly absence- sealed ark bearing us toward morning.

Or in the sudden heat of love when the body senses the cold deeply like breathing in. The Goodbye it is well known. What more to say of it?

We play it back-old film, refugees in our torn ships, sailing the bruised distance.

We walk upright on this earth for our allotted time. Love, we pass you as before. Yet this passing has the shape of farewell.

From Myra Sklarew's "The Science of Goodbyes"

150

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 30/12/2024

I have such a vivid memory of standing quietly in the back of the National Geographic auditorium hearing Myra read that Saturday afternoon. To have her wisdom and her work shared with that rapturous crowd was one of the things we worked hard for with Split This Rock, to honor and transmit lineage.

Natalie Illum, a poet, is seated wearing in a purple top while holding her left hand to her chest as she gazes up lovingly toward the poet Myra Sklarew, an older woman who is smiling with her eyes closed as if telling a story.

100

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 30/12/2024

For all these reasons I was really delighted Myra accepted our invitation to feature as a poet at Split This Rock in 2014. I miss a lot about Split This Rock, but especially those moments when curation allowed us to really present a range and diversity of poets at those festivals.

The poet Myra Sklarew, an older woman with silver hair wearing a brown jacket looks up with a smile on her face facing a person holding one of her books at a book signing.

100

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 30/12/2024

when very few bothered to leave their bubbles. Perhaps it came from her own grounding as the descendant of people whose neighborhood were demolished for the construction of the South Capitol Freeway in the 60s. I also adored her work and its clear speech in devotion to science and religious belief.

Myra Sklarew, an older woman with silver hair reading at a lectern on a large wooden stage in front of a large auditorium filled with a diverse audience of listeners.

110

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 30/12/2024

a steadfast force for good and grace and the myriad ways poetry can bring us together. Over and over I heard of the ways Myra bridged many of the divides that existed in DC's poetry community in the 1970s (along racial lines, or along “neighborhood community” versus “college campus” lines in DC)

Myra Sklarew, an older woman with silver hair reading at a lectern in front of a large auditorium filled with a diverse audience of listeners. One woman on the front row has her head in her hands as if carefully listening.

110

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 30/12/2024

Sad to hear about the death of the poet & teacher Myra Sklarew. Having many friends who were taught by her at American University (she founded American's MFA program in the 80s) I often secretly wished I'd been lucky enough to have studied with her, but I knew her as a force for poetic community,

Myra Sklarew, an older woman with silver hair reading at a lectern. Her hand are held up before her in gesture.

220

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 21/12/2024

Here's a Poetry Starter Pack I created. Did my best. Hope I got everybody.

022

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 10/12/2024

Found out my poem was Poem of the Day on Dickinson's birthday when a friend told me! Amazing how it’s traveled. Students have performed it for Poetry OutLoud and it's in a few textbooks! I only wanted to do justice to Dickinson's power. #poetry #writing www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/153025...

Screenshot of an excerpt from "Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam" on the Poetry Foundation website:

From her mouth perfect words exploded,
intact formulas of light and darkness.
She dared to rhyme with words like cochineal
and described the skies like diadem.
Obscurely worded incantations filled the room
with an alchemy that made the very molecules quake."

2141

Dan Vera @danvera.com · 26/11/2024

Yesterday's beauty: last sun rays hitting the exterior of Louis Sullivan designed, Merchants National Bank bldg in Grinnell, Iowa —one of his little jewelbox banks he created across the Midwest. #architecture #prairiestyle

Sunlight hits a red bricked building with a round rose window surrounded by heavily ornamented terracotta designs that feature floral and vegetal designs.

010