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In our epoch, poetry, its ways and means, its inner core, is fueled by rings upon rings of festivity, in city after city. The New Orleans Poetry Festival is a but grand pooling of all those energies. Down here, we're all about release. For free. Come refuel for free.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

For me, Dickinson, is part of the puzzle in how to respond to our nagging Zeitgeist, as is Brecht. Dickinson, for the unearthed shining placard quality, density of script reconcentrating the mind; Brecht, for the fireside fables of needed action, loosening the trappings of decor.

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

I literally save/pay/sacrifice at least about 1.6k out of pocket to go to AWP. You see, poetics is mainly about the Contact Zone (that murky miraculous space between speaker and listeners). While you're alive. This biz. All else is dross.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Like every single poet at AWP, I'll simply be shaking a few eery trees of the zeitgeist in total darkness. Enter this uncanny valley with us to see if we're indeed contemporaries or something else entirely.

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

There's so much historically charged debris flying around right now, only poetics can even begin to capture the storms slappin us around non-stop. Stay strong, peeps.

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

time.com/7267756/repl...

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

It's not about "how to write an effective political poem", it's about whether a 'political poem' can be written at all. That's the zero hour, the cut point. Begin there. Assume you don't have the guts, heart, and mind to do so. Infold that starved condition into the piece itself.

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

The NOPF. NOTHING LIKE IT. HOPE TO SEE Y'ALL. 😎 www.myneworleans.com/10th-annual-...

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

There's many kinds of "resistance poems". All are compromised. One is the sprawling testimonio poem that aims to lay bare a speaker's emotional journey. Another aims to zoom way out by employing minimalist word clusters. This one's of the latter: riseupreview.org/rodrigo-tosc...

submitted 51 days ago • 0 comments

The biggest open secret about poets, is the ardent bonds they form with one another, be they alive or dead. After years, decades, the luminous presence or lingering spirit of poet friends, spurs us onward to heights heretofore 𝘱𝘭𝘶𝘯𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴, hunched over.

submitted 55 days ago • 0 comments

"choose your fighters" Emily Dickenson: tolerance for intricacy. Langston Hughes: hell bent on public address. Bertolt Brecht: dialectical material thinking. John Donne: exquisite room for doubt. Nicanor Parra: brevity. Rae Armentrout: boldness. Lucille Clifton: sincerity.

submitted 57 days ago • 0 comments

The U. S.'s most lauded, most prized, most in our faces 24-7 poets, are totally MIA during these times. They're squandering the civic space they've been afforded. Even more disheartening are the legions of young poets who've modeled themselves after them. Our slush pile readers.

submitted 58 days ago • 0 comments

At some point, you stop being particularist about your outrage - that image, that occurrence, those protagonists, and you turn on empire, the actually existing empire, and, if you're a cultural dabbler, its cultural fronts. At that point, you become againstishly baroque.

submitted 59 days ago • 0 comments

2010 Chilean movie (in English), "Adentro y Afuera" (In and Out), with Cecilia Vicuña, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marie Howe, Bob Holman, Quincy Troupe, Laura Elrick, Rodrigo Toscano, and others. cinechile.cl/pelicula/ade...

submitted 69 days ago • 0 comments

Opinions, perspectives, and "hot takes" on cultural-political paradigm shifts are vastly inferior to poetic distillations and expansions that track historical contradictions, letting words talk to words, so we can grasp something entirely new, shucking off prefabbed sentiment.

submitted 74 days ago • 0 comments

Friends, Here's a Kenyon Review new sound clip of me reading "Clearing Lines" from the Imperium section of WHITMAN.CANNONBALL.PUEBLA (Omnidawn, fall 2025). A poem about the inability to write a poem on the atrocious (by now, futile) war in Ukraine. soundcloud.com/the-kenyon-r...

submitted 83 days ago • 0 comments

MLA New Orleans visitors! We've got a great reading for you. Swing by. We start at 7 on the sharp side.

submitted 90 days ago • 0 comments

Poetic digressions are essential. When strong, they stretch the harmonic capacity of a poem. When weak, they distangle the reader's earnest attention. And if a journal editor's mind is already distangled or too stiff, your artfully tensioned poems will be artlessly declined.

submitted 95 days ago • 0 comments

Thanks DIAGRAM! For taking a chance on these five poems from my upcoming book WHITMAN.CANNONBALL.PUEBLA. (Omnidawn, 2025) "Prophets & Motels" "Perturbutron 500" "Pax Americana" "Ten Coalitions Twenty Parties" "Two Maestro Bards" thediagram.com/24_4/toscano...

submitted 97 days ago • 0 comments

"American Exeptionalism" (Global Hegemony) in its death rattle has homologic forms in many poetries (entire careers are buoyed up by institutional efforts to maintain a homeland "I"-center of temporal subjectivity). Its enemy is any embryonic historical material consciousness.

submitted 100 days ago • 0 comments

Too experimental for 20`s frontline sifters. Too digressive for 30's poetry puritan readers. Too rebellious for 40's junior institution-guarding editors. Too historical materialist for 50's & 60's national cultural managers. Otherwise, my poesy is skipping along just fine.

submitted 101 days ago • 0 comments

Thank you @TwinBirdReview for running these poems. I grew up in San Diego, so the sea still tugs at my psyche. "The Spot" an actual nightmare about social alienation and apocalypse. "Theatrics of the Continental Shelf" - a quirky paean to the beach. www.twinbirdreview.com/22---p---tos...

submitted 114 days ago • 0 comments

I don't mind The Person in poetry, it's the "individual" that rankles me. A person is 𝘥𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘶𝘢𝘭 across key domains of social existence, like the movement of classes in a particular time & place. Tired of readings having to endure the Great American Individual.

submitted 115 days ago • 0 comments

Sometimes, I just hunker down on the philosophical priors that go into a poetic-politic. sonorareview.com/2024/12/13/t...

submitted 117 days ago • 0 comments

These are truly dizzying times. Some poets are jacked on riding the dizzy, accelerating it even. Others, struggle to dampen the mad whirling. A third type is grinding out poetics that mediate accelarationism and quietism, seeking the outlines of an impossible new realism.

submitted 126 days ago • 0 comments

The glacial movements of American poetry journals snuffing out the vitality of whatever zeigest might get us on track. Four - six - eight - ten months! Poetic raw acts rendered archival, obscure subjects of salvage poetics.

submitted 129 days ago • 0 comments

There's many American poets who are still very fluent in national unipolar globalist poetics. They can expertly belt out all the old joys, traumas, rages, erotics, and styles of wit from that 25 year era. Then there's institutionally uncaptured poets kicking ass in this new wild.

submitted 135 days ago • 0 comments

For my writing practice, sonnets must have 14 lines, each line 10 syllables. They must involved with argumentation. Best if they lay bare the tension and ultimate balance between latinate and saxon words. But most of all, sonnets must be tuning into the political-cultural zeitgeist.

submitted 136 days ago • 0 comments

Happy to have my poem, "Espectacularistas", in this Taylor Swift songs anthology. I'm interested in all things Early End of Empire: the ecstacy, the horror, the fancifulness, the historical churn of it all. Poems can act as filtration lenses to capture energies that are hard to detect.

submitted 137 days ago • 0 comments

Fuck shrinking into ashrams of poetic insularity. I wanna be out and about and ready to drop shit on people from WHATEVER "walk of life".

submitted 138 days ago • 0 comments

A poem from WHITMAN.CANNONBALL.PUEBLA. (Omnidawn, 2025). timberjournal.org/archive/pax-...

submitted 139 days ago • 0 comments

Greetings friends! Good to be here with you. Who doesn't love a fresh start! Here you'll find my concerted thoughts and whimsies on all things poetics. On my website, you can read dialogues with other writers, links to my books, media, and my poetry under the tab "poetix". rodrigotoscano.com

submitted 147 days ago • 0 comments