Buckle up, this is a thread about sonnets. I know people are discussing @DianeSeuss's sonnet, and I know that some are taking to task the poet who didn't see it as a sonnet. (1/) You might not like the tone of the poet questioning Seuss' sonnet, but hers is a question other students of mine have had when reading contemporary sonnets: basically, when does a sonnet--once it's sheared off so many of its traditional conventions--cease to be a sonnet? (2/

DISSENT, A THREAD: OK, I'll play. The problem with this is that it seems to ignore how Eliot's modernism both inspired aesthetic admiration and rejection in American poetry: the Confessionals (for ex) (1/13) nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opi… both admired Eliot and then deliberately worked in a different register because they understood that register to be limiting. They, too, were influenced by tech: the arrival of the TV, which ushered in anodyne programs about American domestic life that they rejected (2/13).

1. I am definitely thinking of leaving this site. Anyone who has read Elizabeth Williamson's SANDY HOOK, or who has paid attention to the ways that private companies do not transparently moderate site content or that rely on AI to moderate content knows that disinformation 2. spreads (and has spread) like wildfire on these sites, that it causes political and social division, and that often the CEOs of these very social media sites use the language of free speech in disingenuous ways in order to protect corporate interests, not

1. Depicting a racist insult or gesture on the page becomes the performance of racism when that insult or gesture is not also critically unpacked. It's because the violence of the insult can be deafening, & because racist language itself isn't nuanced. It's not designed 2. to inspire complex or critical reactions in the listener, but to humiliate or conspire with the listener depending on her race. Which is why the depiction of racist language and gestures needs an active critical response to it if we are to have a historically/socially complex

1. On #Publishingsowhite and Why Race in Publishing Matters: A Thread.

So I literally turned in my book on cultural appropriation to my editors yesterday. This is a very small sample of what I wrote re: American Dirt. 2. ""Researchers at the Stanford University Literary Lab discovered that not only does 86 percent of the publishing industry identify as White, but both book acquisition rates and book advances are lower for writers of color because publishers don’t consider their target audience

1. I'm sure this will drive a certain twitter readership insane, but I agree with this writer's assessment.

newrepublic.com/article/155930… 2. The passage that most strikes me is this: "Kaur’s verse is compact in part because she’s thinking within the parameters of a smartphone screen, which is not that radical when you consider that many poetic forms are about artificial constraint."

On Being Called 'Prolific': A Thread

1. I keep thinking of a convo I had the other week with a group of young women MFA students at a school I'd been reading at. 2. One student asked how I maintained my work schedule, how I published a book almost every year, how she could be prolific too. She looked stressed, & I told her honestly that I would NOT work the way I'd been working the past two years (which has been INSANE)