iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reading: Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek (2026). Thek, c. 1969, in a postcard to a critic: “Isn’t it an artist’s job to constantly say goodbye to art?” Paul Thek, “Untitled (Five Vertical Red Lines),” acrylic, gesso on newspaper, c. 1981

Paul Thek, “Untitled (Five Vertical Red Lines),” c. 1981
(acrylic, gesso on newspaper)

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 21h

Found in a box of old letters a friend recently returned to me, the torn-off corner of a newspaper. Pretty certainly out of an Ithaca, N.Y. weekly called The Grapevine, a late-’seventies countercultural rag that sported bylines like “Swampfox” and “Canadian Bacon.” Me addressing the bigger topics.

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Andrew Brewerton @ajbrewerton.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Ginkaku-ji, Kyoto

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kimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

(last day of September ) At dusk, the blue-tailed bee-eaters catch dragonflies in mid-air.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Alerted by Pat Nolan’s soulful “Smoking Poet” cut: today’s the anniversary of W. H. Auden’s death (d. 29 September 1973). I rather admire the chutzpah behind William Matthews’s “In Memory of W. H. Auden,” how it works (slantwise, at least) off Auden’s own “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”

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Paulo da Fonseca @paulodafonseca.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

John Foster. 9 years – Accidental Mysteries

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Robbie Richardson @londonmikmaq.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I just gave a lecture on the French and Haitian Revolutions and got to use this amazing 1948 painting by the Haitian artist Dieudonné Cedor depicting the 1791 Vodou gathering in the forest of Bois Caïman, the pivotal ceremony that ignited the revolution.

A priest dressed in bright scarlet robes stands at the center with arms outstretched upward, directing the ritual invocation.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

A kind of serial photography . . .

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kimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

(note to Tu Fu's poem "Written on the Wall at Chang's Hermitage") The recluse Wang Hui-chih (d. 388) set out "on a whim" to visit a friend. When he arrived at the friend's house, however, the mood had vanished, so he simply returned home without seeing his friend. -David Hinton

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

6:23 a.m., still lying ponder-prone in bed. A great horned owl begins its hooting, close by, for several minutes, and stops. Now again, but distant.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Out of Merrill Gilfillan’s Three Roans in the Shallows, One of Them Blue: Selected Poems (Flood Editions, 2024). “Piles of words like piles of stone”—the word / rock corollary again. Poem like a dry stone wall, rock fence. Pieces of the world stacked up to fit. Look and stray look made to fit.

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Ella Maillart @ellamaillart.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

"From the jutting shoulder the wings hang, their dark, shining plumes like an armour of overlapping plates. The black talons are enormous, and issue from a grey, scaly sheath of skin to grasp the leather glove." #EllaMaillart #Photography #Kyrgyzstan #TianShan #Falconry #GoldenEagle #Eagle

A Kyrgyz eagle hunter (berkutchi) wearing a fur hat and holding a tame golden eagle on his arm. Mature female eagles are typically trained because they grow significantly larger, heavier and more aggressive.

The hunter wears a thick, reinforced leather gauntlet (biasley) on his right hand to protect his forearm from the eagle's crushing talons, along with a traditional fur cap (tymak) to withstand extreme alpine winter temperatures.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Out of Whitman’s “Proto-Leaf” (1860)—subsequently called “Starting from Paumanok” (1867)—a syntactical dilly of a stanza. (Removed in later versions: ”With accumulations, now coming forward in front, / Arrived again”—offering but little in way of relief, or clarity.)

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Jesse Locker @jessemlocker.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Reverse side of a painting, 1670, Oil on canvas, 67 x 87 cm (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen)

A trompe l'oeil painting of the back of a canvas, and a little (illusionistic) tag attached with a wax seal that says "56)

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kimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

In the field I found Yesenin’s cow observing a small cloud. -Yannis Ritsos (tr. Paul Merchant)

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

To revise Whitman’s “The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing” with its suggestion of pure heart, pure music (“all words are mean before the language of true music”) to read, with processual oomph, keeping it unfinished: “The words of my book nothing, the draft of it every thing.”

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

John Ashbery, in the Paris Review interview: “On the whole I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up.” And, reading Kevin Davies’s sprawling new Transfer Portal (Edge, 2026), I keep seeing a slapstick Ashbery,

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David Wheatley @nemoloris.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Messiaen’s national service in the French army got off to a good start with a complete failure to open and unpack his locked suitcase, a display of such ineptitude his officers decided he would be best deployed giving music lessons to his fellow soldiers.

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kimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Gary Snyder / from “Japan First Time Around” in <Earth House Hold>

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Walt Whitman, in a notebook, c. 1854, points to “earliest times“ when “every thing written at all was poetry . . . history, laws, religion, war, were all in the keeping of the poet.“ And concludes with a curiously modernist sense, the omnivorous need to appropriate the unpoetic:

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~Art+Rage~ @artrage.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Exworth dedicated every spare moment to building bizarre & brilliant assemblages that expand far beyond any simple definition of ‘sculpture’ or ‘installation’...Using nails, wood offcuts, bodily plaster casts, discarded signage or enormous metal doors to make his own unique forms of Gesamtkunstwerk.

worldofinteriors.com

These awe-inspiring art installations lie hidden inside forgotten sheds

A new book by photographer Jem Southam documents the incredible installations conceived by sculptor Ray Exworth in an array of unassuming sheds

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Out of László Krasznahorkai’s befittingly bleak and Ouroboric novel Satantango (1985, translated by George Szirtes, 2012), a somewhat Beckettian rap.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Richard Diebenkorn's 'Knife and Tomato,' (1963) belongs to series of glowing, sensuous pictures which celebrated light and colour of the everyday; reinforcing Diebenkorn's philosophy that they should be judged only in terms of painting.

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kimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

All men know the uses of being useful, but no one knows the uses of being useless. -Chuang-tzu, from “Song of the Madman of Ch’u” (tr. A. C. Graham)

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

William Carlos Williams (b. 17 September 1883), under the title “Vortex” (1915): “I affirm my existence by accepting other forces to be in juxtaposition to my own either in agreement or disagreement.” Adding by hand: “By the quality of the contacts I affirm its [presumably, existence’s] quality.”

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

TANKING Like a gin-soaked spit- baller, a dumpy little rain is coming down, & barely delivering. Fed up with la poésie. (A wholly forgotten squib recently found, rescued off a drive going defunct, prior to my access thereto being pulled.)

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kimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I have watched my body emptied of all its events and tossed into the propeller stream with a single question, asked of the water: Is home where we start from, or is home where our journeys take us? -Ranjit Hoskote

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Flood Editions @floodeditions.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Now Available from Flood Editions: Close Second Person by Graham Foust. “The poems in Close Second Person bristle with an indefatigable intelligence, a sense of erudition and information so dense one can only marvel at everything they have to say. Phenomenal.”—Matthew Specktor

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UKRin @ulrich-k-roessler.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Aishwarya Ganapathi statue in Avancha, Thimmajipet, Telangana, 12th Century by a king of the Western Chalukya dynasty Source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ga...

Large granite boulder: carved in the shape of Ganesha with painted eyes and tuskers, ornamented with flower garlands, ribbons, a red flag, and yellow-orange-red tumeric dyes.

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kimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Kathleen Raine

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Crashing around in a post-retirement cyber-mess of misplaced data, new and unfamiliar systems, recalling easier less-presumptuously obtuse times (“Grinning like soap”) when a boy might scribble down “Nothing is keeping me here.” Early ’70s, anniversary of who knows, out of my Rubbing Torsos (1979).

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Flood Editions @floodeditions.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

A new edition of Ronald Johnson's Radi os will be published in 2027, with a few corrections and an added essay. The Outworks: Collected Later Poetry will be published sometime thereafter.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Possible misdirections out of stray perusals. William Carlos Williams, in a undated letter, slightly misquoting the lovely opening salvo of a short Kay Boyle letter dated “Nov. 17—1930”:

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John Lurie @johnlurie.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The Last Thoughts of What's his Name

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Out of the self-termed “opusculum” The Spirit Walks, the Rocks Will Talk: Eccentric Translations from Two Eccentrics, by Ronald Johnson, with Vignettes by Guy Davenport (The Jargon Society, 1969), fragments of writings by Le Facteur Cheval, constructor of Le Palais Idéal in Hauterives:

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Gilbert White @gilbertwhite.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

1777: Dark with spitting rain, spitting rain.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The final couplet of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “Doggerel” (Draft 75), whose epigraph, by the 18th century “Weaver” poet John Bancks, reads: “Who would succeed, as well as greatly think, / Must sing by Rule, and ne’er in language sink.” A fine retort, and I love that “mishegoss.”

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

So long, Rachel Blau DuPlessis. She once wrote me a longish letter about, among other things, my writing at “Isola di Rifiuti,” that I could only reply to briefly, promising more. And then, the way things sometimes go, didn’t. Of her monumental Drafts (she called it “a very multiple project,

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

'The Chintz Tablecloth.' (1948) Margaret Thomas is one of the great unsung post-war British artists - she painted commonplace subjects which were rendered extraordinary by her singular vision, much like her contemporary Margaret Green.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Early in Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John (2022), on John’s painting, “The Convalescent“: “The wall behind her is flecked with mustard-coloured dots placed randomly and precisely, as marks in nature always are, like the speckles on an egg.”

Gwen John, “The Convalescent,“ c. 1023-4
Celia Paul: “The whole composition is a symphony in grey.”

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Daffy Charles Wright, in “Georg Trakl Journal”: “the landscape spoke to me / Wherever I turned, / Chook-chook and interlude chook-chook and interlude…” Surely, drunk and shining in Charlottesville, wouldn’t I be endlessly muttering it to Bill and Terry? Here it comes: “Chook-chook and interlude…”

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Rabih Alameddine @rabihalameddine.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Amedeo Modigliani, Caryatid, ca. 1913-14

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Remembering how Bob Dylan, on the Theme Time Radio Hour, relayed how Dolly Parton said she wasn’t ever bothered by being called a dumb blonde. Something like: “First of all,” she said, “I know I’m not dumb. And second of all, I know I’m not blonde.”

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Meropi ( Nancy Meropi Ypsilantis Dupree) @meropi5.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

« J’aime les nuages… les nuages qui passent… là-bas… là-bas… les merveilleux nuages ! » Baudelaire

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Charles Wright again, out of “Looking Around,” a poem that begins, “I sit where I always sit, in back of the Buddha,” and ends, “no hieroglyphs, no words to the wise.”

“Portrait of Giorgio Morandi,” Herbert List, 1953
Black and white photograph

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