iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Kate Beall @katebbeall.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Here’s a little morsel from Éireann Lorsung’s Pattern-book

SONNET FOR THE SECOND-LANGUAGE SPEAKER

What is a word? — Depends on who you ask.
For instance, in the rigid Flemish taal,
so many things that feel like words don't pass,
and my sprung language doesn't work at all.
My sentences are yet another place
where stringent rule-embracers don't agree:
to me, an error shows the second face
of grammar. The mistakes are what I mean.
The thing I value most in any line—
drawn, made, wrote, thought; in fantasy or fact—
is flexibility: that, like a spine,
the art supports the mind by which it's maked.
What use is language flattened, dried in books?
Our language lives most when it is mistook.

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Todd Dillard @toddedillard.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

old snow poem of mine I never got to sending around

Filling the Moving Truck with Snow

How will we know which is the kitchen snow
and which is the bathroom snow?
But then we only have the truck for the day.
Toy snow mixed in with the living room snow.
Snow angels crumpled beside footprints
left by stumbles, by nights dancing.
Or did they belong to the dead?
Stoic at night snow blanketing sloppy noon snow.
Under-the-tree snow tanned by northbound birds.
A few perfect flakes stowed in a jewelry box
made from last year’s final squall.
When we open it, a windup snow ballerina
twirls on one leg, arms ovaled, her other leg
missing. An accident, our daughter says,
crumbs of snow scattered across her cheeks.
When the truck is full she uses her finger
to write ‘FRAGILE’ on the pile.
We kiss her head and applaud her spelling.

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Alexander Chee @alexanderchee.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Such unbelievable relief seeing Mamdani sworn in.

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Happy New Year everyone!!! 🎆 Posting a poem by James Merrill, from his book, “The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace.”

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Alexander Chee @alexanderchee.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Thank you to my friends on here, including those of you I’ve never met. This place helped keep me together in a year that seemed to try to pull me apart. Happy New Year!

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Jack Saebyok Jung 정새벽 @daybreakjung.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Year of the Red Fire Horse. I’m reminded of a poem by Jeongrye Choi about a legendary warrior who cuts off the head of the horse that always carried him to his lover’s house, believing this act will allow him to fulfill his destiny. The poem, however, takes a different view.

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Derrick Austin @paradiselaust.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl The Last of Sheila Identikit Tenet

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Chen Chen @chenchenwrites.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

favorite books i read this year (not necessarily published this year): Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang Green of All Heads by Aracelis Girmay All of It Singing by Linda Gregg An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang Moving the Bones by Rick Barot Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez After Image by Jenny George

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Chen Chen @chenchenwrites.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

got to read a favorite poem to some adorable farm friends

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

Late night reading with Rainer cherries and The Wind Spirit. I also watched the meteor shower at 3 a.m…

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

I’ve been working on my French lately… 📚

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

beautiful post-rain clouds here in New Jersey… 🌧️

scattering of clouds at sundown, over a New Jersey field with a small factory building in the distance

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

I do not think I could ever properly prank someone. It would break my heart

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

From “St. Paul and All That,” by Frank O’ Hara.

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Nick Fleisher @nickfleisher.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

I hope university presidents are learning this lesson in light of the current targeting of Columbia. There is no amount of repression you can engage in that will satisfy the Trump administration. The repression simply makes you visible, a metonym for the problem and a target for punishment.

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Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Breaking: WASHINGTON (AP) — 21 civil service employees are resigning from Elon Musk's DOGE, refusing to "dismantle critical public services."

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Chen Chen @chenchenwrites.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

very sad to learn of Danielle Legros George's passing. what a poet, so attuned to both history & dream. what a community builder, as Boston Poet Laureate & as a person who always asked about you, yes you, & meant it

What is Water?
by Danielle Legros Georges

What is water but rain but cloud but river but ocean
but ice but tear.
What is tear but torn what is worn as skin as in as out
as out.
Exodus. I am trying to tell a tale that shifts like a gale
that hurricanes and casts a line
that buckles in wind that is reborn a kite a wing.
I am far
from the passage far from the plane of descending
them,
suitcases passports degrees of mobility like heat
like heat on their backs.
This cluster of fine grapes Haitian purple beige
black brown.

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Jared Beloff @readinstead.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

How are any of you writing poetry right now? I admire you.

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 22/02/2025

Lately for both poetry and painting, I’ve been looking at cave drawings/paintings. Look at this one, over 29,000 years old. Isn’t that beautiful, I think

Cave painting of four horses looking over their young, in warm ochre and sienna. It’s painted on a rock wall or something, I don’t know for sure

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I wrote two new poems in the last few days, and I also cooked this Cornish hen with rosemary mashed potatoes tonight!!

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

“Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur / Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.” —W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone.”

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

Happy lunar new year! I cooked a Cantonese roasted duck for a dinner with friends, it took me two days. 🪿🎉

roasted duck on a white plate, with parsley and carrot stars as garnish.

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Derrick Austin @paradiselaust.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

Some Manet on his birthday

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

haircut + 5 A.M. writing club 🌎

man with a new haircut taking a selfie in a mirror.

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the Jarvis Cocker of the Chicago lit scene @yoadrianididit.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

"Washington was calm, murderous, neo-classical. More lies than cherry trees and nothing changed." Robert Hass

After I Seized the Pentagon

Washington was calm, murderous, neo-classical.
More lies than cherry trees and nothing changed.
And drowsing home through northern Pennsylvania
the dawn light fooled me. Dreams. We talked
and, half-asleep, my body hummed. We were too excited.
After dark searchlights had cast troopers
in huge shadow on penitential stone. I saw
two shadows raising clubs to beat a girl,
a sickness in my stomach and a worse one in my head,
a pleased sense of historical drama, of the aesthetics
of evil. We were too excited. Eyes open, eyes closed,
I saw frost bleach the hills to western grass
and dreamed of small-breasted girls,
jack cheese. the smell of sweat, the acrid
smell of sage. Hiking, and morning woke me
to a maple blaze.
I thought of pepper trees,
survivors, modest local gods, tough-barked,
of an easy grace and bitter fruit
which grow in riven country near the sea
where spring is clement and the land an aftermath.

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

intense and sudden desire at 5 am to see Montreal again, and Niagara Falls…

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

drinking a bit too much earl grey tonight

man looking to his right with a pen in his hand, a lamp close to the camera lighting a dark room

earl grey tea with a heart-shaped jam cookie. elements of style by Strunk and white- and master of go, by Kawabata.

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Reuben Gelley Newman @joustingsnail.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Bach double violin concerto redoubling through the brain

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Patrycja @patrycjasara.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

bb’s debut year is here! We Contain Landscapes, my first book of poems, comes out in March with @tinhouse.bsky.social 🌀 it would mean a lot to me if you preordered the book for yourself &/or someone you adore from your favorite bookstore, or requested it from your local library

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Alexander Chee @alexanderchee.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

“Art is the medicine the monster produces while trying to survive the labyrinth. When he or she is set free the story is told and made human.” —Parker Posey, You’re On A Plane

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Maureen Thorson @maureenthorson.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

“My candle burns at both ends” A poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-
It gives a lovely light!

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Alina Stefanescu @alinaetc.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

[we] listened to the desert instead. You taught us. Unemployed, fuck the moon. Years later there's a dog biting into my book. -Michal Burkard, "The Blue Line" (for Denis Johnson)

The blue line. The blue hat. The blue Atlantic
and that incredible blue distance to the small
apartment on the other short of the blue continent.

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Dee Lilley🔻 @deelilley.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

The Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder 1565

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Chen Chen @chenchenwrites.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

rip michael burkard love you, true teacher

Michael Burkard’s inscription of his book Entire Dilemma—signed to me:

March 27, 2015

For Chen,
“smell the spring”!
i will miss your
presence very much -
with gratitude,
and much affection,
Michael

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Diane Seuss @dseuss.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Brilliant and kind Aaron Coleman, poet, translator, former student, and friend. pressblog.uchicago.edu/2024/12/21/r...

pressblog.uchicago.edu

Read an Interview with Poet and Translator Aaron Coleman – The Chicago Blog

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T Kira Māhealani Madden @tkiramadden.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

this page of canned phrasing from @mdbell79.bsky.social’s Refuse to be Done is always so appreciated and always feels like an attack. Choose your fighter

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Emma Bolden @emmabolden.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

me: i would like to write a poem my brain: here is the pyhtagorean theorem me: no a poem brain: … me: POEM brain: … … … here is a list of every band that performed at the bronze on buffy the vampire slayer

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

This week I painted the Buddha hovering over Austin, Texas. 36x48 in, water-soluble oil. ⛅️

oil painting of the Buddha hovering over Austin Texas. Daylight with a southern live oak.

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Todd Dillard @toddedillard.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

you ever unsure of what to do so you just reread Brigit Pegeen Kelly until the thing you’re waiting for happens

The Leaving

My father said I could not do it,
but all night I picked the peaches.
The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.
I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.
How many ladders to gather an orchard?
I had only one and a long patience with lit hands
and the looking of the stars which moved right through me
the way the water moved through the canals with a voice
that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering
and those who had gathered before me.
I put the peaches in the pond’s cold water,
all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands
twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,
all night my back a straight road to the sky.
And then out of its own goodness, out
of the far fields of the stars, the morning came,
and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses
just after it has been rung, before the metal
begins to long again for the clapper’s stroke.
The light came over the orchard.
The canals were silver and then were not.
and the pond was—I could see as I laid
the last peach in the water—full of fish and eyes.

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David Hayden @seventydys.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

but you catch the light— H.D., ‘Sea Violet’

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Dr. Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Nikki Giovanni died peacefully at 81 with her partner Virginia Fowler by her side, having written her last book, titled The Last Book, forthcoming in autumn 2025—beloved, iconic, incredible, an example to us all.

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Rioncarnated @reeamilcarscott.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

I really dig that social media is currently full of Nikki Giovanni poems.

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CJ Evans @categoryofoutcast.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Lorine Niedecker.

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Haolun Xu @haolunxu.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

End of my first semester here at the MFA for the Michener Center for Writers, in Texas. Holding some Chekhov in this picture taken two weeks ago, and trying not to fall asleep.

Man holding a book and wearing a tote bag, with indigo shirt and big blue jeans. In his apartment very tired

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