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Ecotopian

@ecotopian.bsky.social
4.6K followers 6.8K following 183 posts
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
My new chapbook, Extinction Song, launches with Tupelo Press on May 1st. Pre-order available now: tupelopress.org/bookstore/p/...
Cover of Extinction Song (Tupelo Press, 2026).
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
I’ve got two new poems out in Image. Here’s a teaser, but you can read both poems in full on the website — or order the print issue! imagejournal.org/issue-124
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
Thank god one of these universities has finally grown a backbone.
nytimes.com
Harvard Will Not Comply With a List of Trump Administration Demands
Federal officials said Harvard must enact “merit-based reform” in hiring and admissions and report international students who broke rules, among other steps. Harvard called the demands unlawful.
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Jorie Graham @joriegraham.bsky.social · 22/03/2025
'Columbia Has Lost Something It May Never Regain': Outrage as the University Yields to Trump's Demands www.commondreams.org/news/trump-c...
commondreams.org
'Columbia Has Lost Something It May Never Regain': Outrage as the University Yields to Trump's Demands | Common Dreams
Columbia University faces backlash for caving to Trump admin demands after the school lost $400 million over alleged inaction to curb antisemitism. Critics decry the move. Is this the end of Columbia ...
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
This is why they hate us. Because we make things. Because we resist their structures of power, and do so with intelligence. Because they know, as Shelley says, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." This one's mine, from Winter, Glossolalia (BSPG, 2022). #smallpoemsunday.
THRUST // The purple-stippled, / brindled cultivars defeat / the heat, wrest moisture / from topsoil desiccated / by the sun's dialectic / with the earth, ripe plums / further ripened, the fogged light / chalked across their skin / gesturing to the red flesh: / the plant supplants a word, world.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
“[W]hat we are witnessing is not just an attack on academia or a set of fiscal reforms or a painful political rebalancing. It is an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist. We may not yet know its full cost, but we will feel its consequences for decades.” @meghanor.bsky.social
nytimes.com
Opinion | The View Inside Trump’s Assault on Universities (Gift Article)
The Trump administration’s attacks on universities will lead to the permanent diminishment of vital American institutions.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
“We must learn from the past. We cannot remain silent in the face of authoritarian attacks on our peers, even if they have not yet come for us.”
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
I disagree with parts of this article, but one thing it gets right is the absolute cowardice of university administrators in the midst of an all out onslaught unfolding against higher education. Saying nothing will not save anyone. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher Education
This is a moment to trumpet the strengths of higher education and address its weaknesses.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
“If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration.” www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | This Is the Greatest Threat to Free Speech Since the Red Scare
Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a frightening sign of an authoritarian slide.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
The arrest of Mr. Khalil represents a clear instance of retaliation against constitutionally protected free speech. This is an attempt to diminish support for Palestinian people and those suffering in Gaza (not to be confused with support for Hamas). www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/n...
nytimes.com
Mahmoud Khalil Is Moved to Immigration Detention in Louisiana
Mahmoud Khalil is a permanent resident of the United States. His arrest sets up a fight over free speech and immigrant rights.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
I hear this is a pretty great contest, with some excellent winners from previous years. Submit!
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
My poem, “The Field Which Had Been a Meadow Once,” is in THE LAST MILKWEED, out now from @tupelopress.bsky.social. The poem takes its title from a poem in @joriegraham.bsky.social’s book TO 2040 (which I highly recommend) and leans into dialogue with Robert Duncan. #poem #newpoem #poetry
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
“Algae pushes north and farther north.”
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Shepseskare in Love @upfromsumdirt.blacksky.app · 31/01/2025
david lynch DARK DEEP DARKNESS
black handwritten words scrawled on tan paper, peppered with glyphs representing a tree, a house, a star, and eyes.

“Dark deep darkness and splendor all around. It was in the roots and under and a tree came out and then a house with stars above—inside the house a man with eyes to see and long arms reaching he saw the splendor all around and reaching out into the deep darkness he saw himself.”
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Tupelo Press @tupelopress.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
Deadline TOMORROW!
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
Poets: where are people submitting these days? I've got a few pieces I want to send out next month, including some from my forthcoming chap. Curious if there are any places that might not be on my list.
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Rene Mullen @renemullen.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
Perhaps our eyes tire & slow so our other senses finally have a chance to breathe. Yet another poem from Frederick Smock
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ronslate.bsky.social @ronslate.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
"When the 'I' appears in Adams' poems, it’s not to offer the stamp of emotional authenticity, but to take advantage of the many masks that a skilled raconteur can adopt": Chris Waddington reviews PAST LIVES, poems by @vjoshuaadams.bsky.social via On The Seawall bit.ly/4anWrMK
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
A poem for #smallpoemsunday. Robert Hass’s “Iowa, January,” one of my favorite small poems in the language.
IOWA, JANUARY

In the long winter nights, a farmer’s dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
You know when you are driving through Massachusetts and then you hit the Vermont border and everything feels calmer and greener? And then you realize it’s because there are no billboards along the road? That’s how it feels going from FB to Bluesky.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
Finally a bit of warm weather. And by warm, I mean, it’s 34° F.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
There are probably better ways to resist, but right now, I’m just trying to control what I can control. I’m turning to the local rather than the global. I’m tending children, animals, plants, and art. I’m making poems and good food. I’m coaxing good into the world, where I can.
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Miriam Gershow @miriamgershow.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
Gah. This is going to be such a gnarly year for book releases. Will you please shout out your forthcoming books so we can spread some hope/joy/excitement?
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
Happy MLK Day to all. Power to you.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 10/01/2025
DC from the air. (Well, really the VA side of the Potomac.)
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 09/01/2025
This week! DC! Busboys and Poets, K St location, Sunday, 5 PM. @busboysandpoets.bsky.social
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 01/01/2025
Had a couple of poems accepted to ring in the new year. 🥂
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 22/12/2024
Joseph Brodsky’s “Star of the Nativity,” from his Nativity Poems (FSG, 2001, but originally published much earlier). A holiday post for #smallpoemsunday on this day, the shortest of the year. Happy belated #soltice!
In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than
to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain,
a child was born in a cave in order to save the world;
it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart.

To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast, the steam
out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior—the team
of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar.
He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.

Keenly, without blinking, through pallid, stray
clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away—
from the depth of the universe, from its opposite end—the star
was looking into the cave. And that was the Father’s stare.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
Another short piece for #smallpoemsunday, this one from A. H. Jerriod Avant’s MUSCADINE (Four Way, 2023). #poem #poetry #shortpoem
“Coroner in the Kitchen,” from A. H. Jerriod Avant’s Muscadine (Four Way Books, 2023).
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
Krystal Anali Vasquez’s Lady Without Land is out now! I had the distinct honor to blurb the book, which is so smart (and hilarious), and I’m reading with Krystal next month in DC to celebrate its release (Busboys & Poets, K St). #newbook #novel #fiction #hybridgenre #latinxlit
Krystal Anali Vasquez’s Lady Without Land (Texas Review Press, 2024)
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
Not a UK resident, otherwise I’d totally apply to this. Maybe you should?
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
Naomi Shihab Nye.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
There's something very Blakean about the role of "magic" in Robert Eric Shoemaker's poems, a kind of imaginative thinking that comprises resistance to the cold, mechanical operations of economy and ideology: "Why magic? Money no work. [System, system.]"
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Here's the beginning to a long-ish poem, "Pastoral," which appeared in Tupelo Quarterly / @tupelopress.bsky.social. It's the last I'll post by way of introduction to Bluesky, but I've got some new poems coming soon! Read the full poem here: www.tupeloquarterly.com/editors-feat... #poetry #poem
Pastoral


A peach tree in the snow. 
A black cloud in a peach tree in the snow. 

I am talking, now, to a consultant 
from the online tax firm
about a form that needs fixing 
and this flimsy piece of former wood 
wavers in the hand.

In the wind, in the hand.
It could have made peaches, or framed a house’s bones.

Instead it serves as background
for columns of numbers
that signify financial decline.
A real and imminent catastrophe.

It is Greek, catastrophe, meaning “downturn,” 
and derives primarily from theater. 

A peach tree in the snow.
Paper leaves in a peach tree in the snow.

Across the street, some men fell a tree, 
a rigid pine whose torqued enormity reminds me 
of the clustered redwoods lining the campus creek
or logged to build Victorian structures
hulking Telegraph’s curb. 

They put the wood in a machine 
that makes wood chips. 
The smell of burning gas precipitates 
a real and imminent catastrophe.

A peach tree in the snow. 
Wood chips in a peach tree in the snow. 

Sheep, deer, wild elk. With their antlers 
they terrorize the bark. Anthers.
The purple flowers throw their seed
and other flowers catch it.

Spent stamen, little rusted pistol.
A bullet lodged in the trunk.

My daughter decapitates
dandelions, cradles the heads
in her hand, watches as the old ones
scatter in the real and imminent wind.

They float on unimpeded
in the hand, in the wind. 

A peach tree in the snow. 
Shell casings in a peach tree in the snow.

My species is industrious, 
dapper and intelligent, 
formed in the lucid substance between 
the sublime and the belligerent.

Ice caps retire and slip into
a warming, gorgeous sea. 

We place granite on our counters,
white stones in the garden.
We watch the turbines turn.

A black cloud in the snow.
A peach tree in a black cloud in the snow.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
Timothy Donnelly’s “Jonah,” from The Problem of the Many (Wave, 2019). #smallpoemsunday #shortpoemsunday #poetry
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
The kids are excited for tonight’s festivities, whatever they might be… Merry Krampusnacht!
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Ryan Mac 🙃 @rmac.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Alright but this is two words
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Not my regular content, but the millennial in me couldn’t resist. 😋
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Read Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost this weekend. One of his best.
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Allison Adair @fascicles.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Reading & interview with the great Robert Hayden is up at the Brockport Writers Forum YT page. This exchange feels very much locked in its time--would love the chance to hear how his views might have changed or perhaps intensified in the ensuing decades, chissà. ❄️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hvF...
youtube.com
Robert Hayden at the Brockport Writers Forum
YouTube video by Brockport Writers Forum
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
One for #shortpoemsunday. A haiku by the great Kobayashi Issa, translated by Robert Hass.
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J-T Kelly @j-tkelly.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
One from Christian Wiman. #smallpoemsunday
Survival is a Style

There are no knives
on the man so thin the wind
whips his cargo pants around him like a dance
to which his bones aspire,

no flares, no smile, no unmetaphorical fire
when the woman in the camouflage jog bra 
jogs by whistling all the while. 
Survival is a style.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Thanks to @kelliagodon.bsky.social for sharing this poem, the title piece from my first book, which seems so distant now…
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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Really, this niche is the global majority, per the above UN survey: "Four out of five people around the world (80 percent) want more climate action from their country." That'd be more than six billion of us.
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Identity Theory @identitytheory.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Bluesky is the Vermont of the internet, and that is a good thing.
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
An excerpt from my poem “Circles,” which appeared as part of a folio in Tupelo Quarterly, along with an interview by the great Henk Rossouw. www.tupeloquarterly.com/editors-feat...
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Here's the companion poem to "Action in the Infinitive," which I posted earlier today. This one is called "Infinite Gyre of Possible Ends" and also appeared in @hopkinsreview.bsky.social, with thanks again to @doramalech.bsky.social! (Click image for alt-text.)
to swaddle the rifle, to wipe clean its lip / to sponge dried milk from an infant’s cheek / to dribble the oil, to torch it completely / to scrape the whole whale from the beach / to stack gold plates, illustrate utopia / to soak the sun’s light from the pitch of the roof / to pace time, its sugared circularity / to unfold its mountainous chain / to husk corn, shuck calcium from mollusks / to shear the lichen-eaten willow oak / to garble the language, gum the words / to tattoo the script on a canvas of palm / to cradle the cycle, censure the system / to scoop, from the floor, a loose silverfish / to swirl the garbage, to compost the knife / to temper the rage in the hurricane’s eye / to filter the fire, to breed the abyss / to pluck bottle caps from ribcages of birds
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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
New poem in @hopkinsreview.bsky.social with thanks to @doramalech.bsky.social!! I’ll post it’s brother this afternoon.
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