A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond.

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond.

Blogs have been declared dead multiple times, mostly "replaced" by Twitter and then newsletters that are really just blogs with email and paywall functionally baked in. And yet, here I still am, blogging again consistently (but not too hard) for the past few years. And I'm not alone. But why? If you've known me for a while, you know a Cluetrain quote is coming!

Like a lot of English teachers, I find myself having to contend with AI and its impact on student writing. We've always dealt with plagiarism such as the good ol' copying-passages-from-books and the more recent copying-and-pasting-from-the-web, but what generative AI produces is even harder to come to terms with. I often have my students write a quick 1-paragraph response to what they read.

The red light seems like it will last forever. My eyes drift up to the camera mounted above the intersection. I imagine a lonely surveillant glasseyed staring at the city’s intersections on a bank of dim monitors. I perform “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” from Macbeth, wondering if my invisible audience is surprised by this sudden bit of theater, entranced by my flawless and impassioned performance.

Lately, I've found myself wanting to wend my way back into a regular blogging/writing practice. I've been at this off-and-on for 20 years come October; although, it's been mostly off the past few years. A lot has changed too. Much of the interesting open web that existed when I started has largely disappeared behind walled gardens over which we have no control, and so many blogs I once followed are now AI-generated spam sites.