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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Happening tonight in Buffalo.

R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Gunshots at a St. Mark's Poetry Project reading in 1968, but don't worry--"it was a benefit shooting" (Kenneth Koch). Excerpt from Joe Dunthorne’s review of Conversations with New York School Poets: Interviews by Yasmine Shamma, edited by Rona Cran& Yasmine Shamma, with contributions by Nick Sturm.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Had to forfeit my UFC catch match tonight because Dana White isn't providing vegan snacks in the dressing room. 😉

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Passage from Dan Chiasson's essay "Stop Trying to 'Help Me Write'" in the New York Review of Books: "... we arrive at one of the appropriate emotions for this moment, which is anger. (Another emotion, grief, is waiting close by.)"

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Wake up, babe! The Pope is quoting Gandalf...😅

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

This was the final Creeley poem read by @l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e.bsky.social for @justbuffalolit.bsky.social and @ubpoetics.bsky.social on the final evening of the Creeley Centenary Symposium in Buffalo. A person reading this poem could derive an entire poetics from it.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

One more page from Creeley, this the last three stanzas from "A Calendar" from Memory Gardens (1979). "...Only us then/ remember, discover / still can care for / the human." @ubpoetics.bsky.social

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Juliana Spahr is the recipient of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan University Press).

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

The Buffalo poetry and Poetics community we now have in this city and much the blue-collar avant-garde sensibility that is the hallmark of the Buffalo arts and cultural community would not exist in its current constellation had Creeley not made this city his home sixty years ago.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Today's haul from Talking Leaves Books. Books by Charles Bernstein and Elizabeth Willis in preparation for the Robert Creeley Centenary events in Buffalo in May. Who else is coming to Buffalo?

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

R.D. Pohl? Who dat? Big thanks to Edric Mesmer and Yrtemmys Press for this transcription of a 3 hour conversation I had with him in April 2025. It's the latest installment in Yrtremmys Press's Little Book Series, prompted by my forthcoming "Buffalo Poetics and the Rise of a Blue-Collar Avant-Garde."

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Thinking of Michael Silverblatt's recent passing and his time in Buffalo reminded of this Robert Hass poem from his 1972 collection "Field Guide" which received the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

This is often referred to as T.S. Eliot's "conversion [to Anglicism] poem." And the 'conversion' it brought about in me was a strong distaste for Eliot.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

From 2025 in The Atlantic. As we used to say in epistemology, this is "proof of concept" of a paradigm shift in political economic infrastructure. When the unitary executive of a failed democracy comes for the central bankers, that is a litmus test for the fact that we are living in an autocracy.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

1st Just Buffalo Literary Center @justbuffalolit.bsky.social Poem of the Week for 2026: "script eighty-five" by Liz Mariani @lizmariani.bsky.social. This poem first appeared in "Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age — Summer 2025" published by The Chaos Section Poetry Project.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

If 2025 was the Year of The Performative Oligarchs, A.I. Slop, and the People Who Want to Put Their Name on Everything, 2026 will be the Year of the Peasants with Pitchforks. Go out to your shed now and sharpen your tines! From these barren soils, we can plant a more promising crop.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

To close out 2025 @justbuffalolit.bsky.social, a poem from the archive: John Logan (1923—1987), one of my professors at UB with "Believe It" from 1981. This poem first appeared Only the Dreamer Can Change the Dream: Selected Poems (BOA Editions Ltd.,1981). Next week, we are back to living poets!

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

LIGHT, a winter solstice and last day of Hanukkah poem by Irving Feldman for Dec. 21 JBLC @justbuffalolit.bsky.social Poem of the Week. This poem was from my personal archives. The source is Irving Feldman's The Pripet Marshes (1961). Irving is 98 now, still active in the community.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

The Buffalo Sabres organization is now in that grace period when no one yet knows how to pronounce the new general manager's name. Those two Finnish vowels are called ääkkösets. Might take a whole season for the fan base to learn how to pronounce his name well enough to call for his firing.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

The University at Buffalo, where Morton Feldman (1926-1987) was Edgard Varèse Professor of Music Composition from 1973 to 1987, will host a Feldman@100 Celebration featuring talks and concert performances on January 12 & 13th of 2026 at the UB North Campus. Link is in comments.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

I send you salutations from Buffalo.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

I send you salutations from Buffalo.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Public trust in the media in general has hit a new low across the political spectrum, with only 8% of Republicans and 27% of Independents reporting that they placed a"great deal or a fair amount of trust" in the mass media.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

Cindy Sherman, from 30 Essex St. in Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center on Buffalo's West Side in 1975 to the cover of The New Yorker's as "Being Eustace" [Tilly] in its "The Culture Industry: A Centenary Issue" a half century later.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

Nick Sturm ‬: "The Poetry Foundation invited me to write an essay remembering Alice Notley (1945-2025). I'm grateful for the space to remember her in this way." Link in comments.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Buffalo-based poet Rachelle Toarmino's second full-length collection of poems HELL YEAH drops in October from Third Man Books. Link to purchase in comments.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

Easy to make jokes about Elon's hubris, but if Neuralink is going to hack the human limbic system— the complex network of brain structures located deep within the brain, responsible for emotions, memory, motivation, and behavior—then we are talking about more than AI superintelligence.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

With the Smithsonian brought to heel, guess the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities are probably next up for an ideological purge. In that likelihood, who among us would even want to apply for a grant?

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

If social media is dead, then somehow Meta harvested $62.36 billion in 2024 in net profits from the corpse. Meta's defense in the FTC anti-trust case against it is that it can’t possibly have a monopoly on personal social networking—because personal social networking no longer meaningfully exists.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Fight Club but for Humanoid Robots! Performance artist Chris Burden anticipated this in the 1980's, but I'd rather see this on the White House lawn on July 4th of next year rather than the UFC fight that Trump is planning. Would be more attuned to the Zeitgeist.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Watch the body language of both Putin and Trump in the public phase of the Alaska summit. Trump's entire public persona is dominance-coded. But in the 2018 Helsinki Summit, Trump clearly was deferential to the bigger bear.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

"Many people sense that the United States is undergoing an epistemic crisis, a breakdown in the country’s collective capacity to agree on basic facts, distinguish truth from falsehood, and adhere to norms of rational debate." Argument by Dan Williams here is that algorithms are just part of it.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

Heidegger, still not a bestselling philosopher in the Rust Belt!

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

Joyce Carol Oates, today on Twitter as to where her interest in writing On Boxing came from. It was from her dad, who was a friend of a Buffalo middleweight when she was a child. But, believe it or not, this comment thread was about women writers and the literary critic Harold Bloom!

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

LitHub: Random House announced today that a brand new novel by George Saunders will be landing on bookshelves this winter, on January 27, 2026. Vigil takes “place at the bedside of an oil company CEO, in the twilight hours of his life, as he is ferried from this world into the next.”

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

I'd say the inflection point happens when your Führer shoots himself in a bunker (so to speak). Up until that point, the empire creates its own reality, however counterfactual. The economists, and the fact-checkers, and those who report the body counts—they're wrong until the moment they're right.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Martin Heidegger now 50% off at Rust Belt Books on Grant St. in Buffalo. They've got the Sein, if you have the Zeit. Which philosophers do you think they should deep discount next?

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Source material: How Superman Would End the War, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, for Look magazine, February 27, 1940. Superman was always an anti-fascist.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

So apparently, META AI is attempting to coerce me into adopting an avatar that portrays me as the Lex Luther of the Left. 😂

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist for The Buffalo News Adam Zyglis has been forced to cancel the closing reception for his exhibit at The Buffalo History Museum tonight because of credible threats of harm to him and his family. I was planning on attending.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas (still writing at age 96) on the end of Modernity, the repudiation of Enlightenment principles, and--although he doesn't use this term--the rise of an anti-rationalist "Dark Enlightenment."

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

Today's haul from Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo. Alina Stefanescu's My Heresies (Sarabande Books) @alinaetc.bsky.social

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

As per J. Dale Shoemaker at Investigative Post, these are ICE's enforcement parameters in the Buffalo and the Western New York area. Warrants are not needed, claims an ICE spokesman, and US Citizens must carry documents proving citizenship at ALL TIMES. No exceptions.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

J. Dale Shoemaker of Investigative Post: "If you hear of ICE traffic stops or arrests in Buffalo/Western NY, please DM or email me." jdshoemaker@investigativepost.org

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

We've reached that part of the collapse of a constitutional republic where an authoritarian administration has persuaded the Supreme Court of the United States that the 14th Amendment does not mean what it unambiguously says. Words don't mean what they used to mean any longer.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Why buy this phone? BECAUSE ALL CAPS WILL BE THE DEFAULT MODE! At this point, I'm surprised the Trump Organization hasn't yet pulled a Sydney Sweeney and slapped its branding on bars of orange soap infused with drops of the president's bathwater. 😉

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Just six days ago they pretended to be BFFs in the Oval Office, but each of these *outsized personalities* owns a social media platform and has a troll army of followers. This is the summer blockbuster we've all been waiting for. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has nothing on this. 😉

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

Remembering Robert Creeley (1926-2005) on what would have been his 99th birthday.

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R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Alice Notley (1945-2025) from the collection Grave of Light New and Selected Poems, 1970–2005 published in 2006 by Wesleyan University Press.

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