You don’t have to write. You don’t need it like the air. You do have a choice. You could stop at any time. In all likelihood, no one would be sorry if you did. It would be fine. It might even make you happier. And isn’t that all for the best? Wouldn’t you rather choose how to spend your only life than have it chosen for you?

The one semester I was lucky enough to teach creative writing, the last project I gave my students was to make the most beautiful thing they could imagine. Practically no one wrote a story or a poem. Someone is giving you the same assignment.

organizers of the petition asking the Poetry Foundation to do more to help poets in need plan on visiting the Poetry Foundation in person soon to show the Foundation and its board how much community support they’ve got behind them.

and so they’re asking now for anyone sympathetic to the petition to please help spread the word by sharing on Facebook, tweeting, emailing, etc.

they have also created a Facebook Page which in less than 12 hours has received over 500 Likes !

“If glamour is involved, it’s not in the erotic sense of the word, but in its original sense: professional learning used and fashioned like occult power.”

in a recent Open Letter to the Poetry Foundation the poet Sandra Simonds states:

Last year the Poetry Foundation’s income was over seven million dollars and the foundation’s total assets are well above 150 million dollars. I was disappointed to learn that the Poetry Foundation gives only around $7,500 annually to poets in need.

A petition to The Poetry Foundation that you can sign if you want has been set up at Change.org

(It currently has 177 signatures)

When procrastinating, what do you do? I need pointers.

Are you Alice Munro or Bret Easton Ellis?

I scored 22/36. You?

**Cheaters will be fatally punished.

“I am not opposed to poems. I love poems. I love people who write poems, passionately. But the SOCIAL ROLE OF POET is a disaster, just like every other social role. The struggle is for the end of roles, for the end of the division of labor, for the end of the gender distinction, for the end of identity as it exists. Free relations, not roles. Poems made by anyone who makes them. No poets.” — Joshua Clover has one point and it’s about rabbits

For a limited time (30 September–9 October 2013) Vdrome is hosting: Matt Wolf’s short documentary “I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard” CHECK IT OUT!!!

How to be Sincere in Your Poetry Workshop

David Gilmour’s goodreads quotes