iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

What a shame. In high school (in the 1970s) I went there to read poetry magazines, copying out addresses so I could submit my adolescent verse. Like so many other openings, snapped shut.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Clerks at the local chain bookstore: one didn’t know where the history section is, the other, who rang me up without making eye contact, ignored my comment about the book being dinged (I was hoping for a discount), but did recite the loyalty program spiel. Yeah, no thanks.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I was really looking forward to collaborating with Myung—I felt a real kinship with her. One of the big might’ve-beens of my life.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

What a stupid, wasteful thing to have done. The nest I flew, my intellectual home away from home. So saddened by this.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

What happened to the UB Poetics Program is nothing less than a scandal. Who stole the Gray Chair endowment money? As it turns out the Robert Creeley Centenary event in May will have been the last event sponsored by the program.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Holiday camaraderie in the long line at the grocery store

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Reposted by Ben Friedlander (he/him/his)

Joseph Howley @illdottore.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

No email from a library system stirs the imagination like a notice my scan is ready to download through WORLDCAT. The great cat that surrounds the world? That nuzzles the roots of the world-scratching-tree? The great world cat who is and was and shall be? That cat???

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

Annoying as hell when submitting a letter of recommendation requires ranking the student in numerous categories, but good god the school that has a drop-down menu for each one.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

I was going to tag my Wtg Studies colleague for an actual answer but she appears to have deactivated her account

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

I don’t either but it seems to mark a field-wide shift in emphasis from the humanities to social sciences

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

I’m at a public uni and not sure the program even has a name! It’s not on our website anyhow. The course is called College Composition and the faculty most involved with it speak of their field as Writing Studies, def not Comp/Rhet.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

I also think rhyme that doesn’t have that bounce can still contribute to a poem’s overall effect, its sense of musicality or eloquence, as so often happens with assonance and consonance. Which is not the case, obviously, in his prose version of Millner.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

I like his distinction between rhyme and the rhyme effect, though I think I’d credit the latter’s “bounce” (as he nicely puts it) to positioning in general—“rhythmic set-up” for sure, but also syntactic and spatial positioning.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

I was thinking just that!—how her revisions disrupt the very distinction Hollander is making.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Another example, this one closer to Hollander’s, is Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Mrs. Small” (here’s the first page). It raises the question of what exactly counts as free verse, slipping in and out of something that looks like metrical regularity (and GB herself was moving toward free verse then).

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Here’s one that comes to mind—James Merrill’s “Prose of Departure, a Japan travel diary that occasionally breaks off into rhymed 5-7-5 stanzas, sometimes mid-sentence. The effect is hardly Ogden Nash-like.

Page from James Merrill’s “Prose of Departure” with three rhymed “haiku” embedded in prose.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

It’s like saying William McGonagall proves metrical rhyme ridiculous. Also, he’s assuming that rhyme means end rhyme. I suspect free verse has more truck with internal rhyme. I know my own does.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

There are traditions of rhymed prose in other languages so there must be critical writing that could offer some guidelines. Personally, I don’t see any defensible principle behind his claim that rhyme is only appropriate for metrically regular verse. I mean, what does his example really prove?

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

I stopped reading the New Yorker because of this.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Do kids still make crank phone calls? I haven’t received one in god knows how long. Not counting spam and robocalling—institutionalized crank.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

“deskilling students AND stealing their data” says it all and with the succinctness of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.”

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

I don’t understand a journal interface that only lets me print ten pages of an article but does let me download a PDF—which I can then print in full.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

Tying up loose ends on a long chapter isn’t impossible, but then neither is tying a cherry stem with your tongue.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

POST-CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA Blank checks and imbalances.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

“‘The banana plant’…wears the autumn wind and is broken by the autumn wind”—Dōgen

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

Edited an article with a long passage attributed to the wrong person (and much made of that misattribution). Didn’t even get an acknowledgment when it later appeared in a book.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

The Democratic Party: “When they go low, we go high. But when they go right, we follow.”

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

I managed to reserve ten pounds of sour cherries from what I thought was a local farm, but it turns out they’re in Ohio (not Maine). The search continues…

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

I’m going to start asking cashiers if they want to round down.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

The cat gets so mad when she musters all her cuteness and yet I still don’t bend to her will.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

The top ten movie lists aren’t convincing me to watch more movies. Has cinema become a mid art form?

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

Homer‘s Art is a perfect start. My own was How Spring Comes, but someone else’s copy—really wish I had my own.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

A powerful flame has gone out but not the light it shared with us.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Deepest condolences—my love to you and all your mother’s loved ones.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

At my university, increasingly, books are discouraged for tenure. Articles are seen as the safer option. I have mixed feelings about this, as it slides into a devaluing of books, at least on committees that include faculty from fields where books are atypical.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

I would say the first but then I’ve bought books I own because I can’t be bothered to search the boxes where I store them.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

Ha! I met Jim Brodey near the end of his life. He somehow ended up on Bob Grenier’s couch for a month. That was a strange pair.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

I thought I’d lost the thread but I see now it was the wrong metaphor: my thread’s been stripped.

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Heard about an IRB request at my university turned down because it included the phrase “climate justice.”

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Ben Friedlander (he/him/his) @mongibeddu.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

I wonder what bookseller got the titles purged from the Naval Academy Library. I hope they sell at a premium, with part of it going to appropriate causes. He’ll, I’d buy from this list:

media.defense.gov

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