Well deck the halls and call it a holiday! A terrifying new age of the self-repairing machine is nearly upon us and I persist in writing haiku and obscure erasure poems, published mainly on my own blogs. I persist, in other words, in the face of full-on Christian authoritarianism verging on fascism, as a dilettante nature poet and backwoods flaneur. Which sounds unusual unless you’ve ever been to the Appalachians. This is a region that seems to specialize in weirdos of all descriptions, and I am proud to be one of them. I suppose as residents of a national sacrifice area, people develop an especially acute sense of our existential precarity: Rust-Belt rejects, spare parts for broken-down engines. And regardless, here in the United States of America, to live in any place for too long makes you weird. Where’s your ambition?! The Treasury Secretary says that if we can’t afford to live where we live, we can simply move elsewhere. But if there’s one thing fascists hate, it’s anything and anyone who doesn’t fit the mold. To them, a drone that acts as its own mechanic sounds absolutely brilliant, despite or perhaps because of its obvious disincentives for keeping humans around. This is a time for makers everywhere to rebel against the suffocating conformity driven by algorithms and an ecocidal, xenophobic police state. In 2026, I intend to double down on all the sorts of things that machines will never learn to do. In other words, I suppose, I resolve to be as human as humanly possible, and I invite you to join me in what seems like an extremely modest and achievable goal: simply continuing, against all odds, to be odd. Happy Holidays.

I used to think that the main role of poetry was to preserve a space for insight and honest language in a society thoroughly steeped in propaganda, much of it as invisible to us as water presumably is to the fish who swim in it. Now I think it’s even more basic than that. With public discourse increasingly taken over by algorithms and large languge models, and public opinion shaped by a corporate death cult convinced that consciousness can somehow be digitized and made immortal, the language arts are becoming a refuge for embodied humanism. Those with no capacity for empathy can still sometimes write great poems, but for poetry to thrive it needs authentic communication between humans, and it has to continually aspire toward the imaginative worlds of others, human and nonhuman alike.

It’s possible that the proliferation of LLM-generated content will actually create more demand for creative writing by humans, but if so, I think it will take time to reach established page-poets who benefit (to the extent that anyone really benefits) from the current system. In the short term, we might see some new admixture of avant-garde and performance poetry emerge on some unexpected platform—think TikTok or Twitch.

Hell, this is could be happening already, for all I know. I do find, from what I read of contemporary poetry in translation—more than half of my reading these days—that the poets of the world are rising to the occasion of our multiple planetary emergencies. The American university system, upon which so many US poets depend, may be in deep trouble, but China has risen, and its millennia-old poetry culture has been thoroughly revitalized by the infusion of Western forms and ideas—pretty much the same thing that happened with previous poetry booms in the Tang and Song. Dickinson alone has been translated into Mandarin by at least 16 different, well-established translators, just since the 1980s. It puts me in mind of the Daodejing, the second most-translated-into-English book after the Bible.

As a comparative literature major, it delights me no end to think that Emily Dickinson could become the Laozi of China. But returning to the topic of this brief mind-fart, time will tell how the Chinese manage the sorcerer’s apprentice that is AI. Contrary to the initial flurry of propaganda, it turns out that DeepSeek produces longer answers that require more energy, so the CCP is playing Russian Roulette with the biosphere as much as anyone else at this point. It will be interesting to see what Chinese poets make of all this, in a society where dissent is suppressed but poetry is produced and consumed obsessively. And no, I don’t think those two facts are unrelated.

the world is still radiant
gold threading a velvet Elvis

tufted titmice and dark-eyed juncos
foraging under conifers

a shy red squirrel making
a high-pitched growl at me

Dad’s gravestone with a gory fresh
garland of songbird feathers

the gift of the present
can never be kept

but only gestured toward
or danced or sung

and in return one can only
for a while remain present

and find a few words
to delight other ears

I am not a good person.

Over the past month I’ve been spending more time on web work than I have in years, re-learning WordPress in the course of building a whole new website to welcome people to our square mile of mountain land. Poems have been far fewer as a result, but I don’t mind: it feels like necessary work. As a long-time blogger, writing in public helps me think out a new approach to land management and public relations. But this project wouldn’t have come together in the way it has without all those daily walks I’ve been taking, which have helped me work out a vision for Plummer’s Hollow over the past two years.

How does that happen, exactly? What is it about going for a walk that helps clear out the mental underbrush? The connection between literal and figurative path-finding seems real. And when you are writing about the place where you‘re walking, inspiration starts to feel as literal as an in-drawn breath.

I think the homepage is more or less finished now, if you’d like to go visit. It’s, um, a bit more text-heavy than most website homepages, but you know me. We’ll be using the blog not just for news (its current label in the navigation menu) but to flesh out conservation ideas as well. Pick up a free subscription if that sort of thing interests you.

One thing I never anticipated about growing older is how attached I would become to ordinary possessions, how reluctant I am to replace things that genuinely need to be replaced. I tell myself that this is rational behavior: manufacturing is in a terrible state, that’s not my imagination! Whatever new thing I get will almost undoubtedly be worse. But, like, this perfectly ordinary pair of scissors that I’ve been using to trim my beard and mustache once or twice a week for the past 30 years is getting so dull now that it causes me actual physical pain, yet I still can’t bear the thought of replacing it. Fundamentally, I guess I just don’t hold with the passing of time. It’s wrong and I don’t like it.

Words alone cannot stop the onslaught of devastation of Palestinian homes and lives, backed shamelessly and without hesitation by the entire axis of Western power. At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “human animals”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed white phosphorus in Gaza City, the New York Times editorial board wrote that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”; establishment media outlets continue to describe Hamas’s attack on Israel as “unprovoked.” Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects this perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide. We condemn those in our industries who continue to enable apartheid and genocide. We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, but together we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing.

Statement of Solidarity, Writers Against the War on Gaza

I’ve signed. Will you join me?