Todd Dillard
@toddedillard
“Ways We Vanish” from Okay Donkey, “Ragnarök at the Father Daughter Dance” from Variant, finalist for the Donald Hall AWP Prize, poems in Threepenny, Southern Review, APR, HAD, etc.
an em-dash is punctuation but an Em Dash is when you sprint from the ghost of a furious poet
look at this photo of an abandoned camper in a field with a backdrop of wildfire smoke
what if instead of a single starting point grief was a thousand starting points, that's the griefiest grief you can grief right, the good grief, the grief that keeps on griefing
sometimes I make a meme that really captures who I am as a person too
when I tell a story about being a dad these are the only two responses I want @thecorlew.bsky.social @monostich.bsky.social
love how turned up collars in Transtromer reminded me of turned up collars in Vallejo “Winter had come while they lay together.” -Transtromer “My mother turns up the collar of my overcoat, not because it is begin- ning to snow, but so it can begin to snow.” -Vallejo
sometimes instead of trying to write a poem I write a bunch of lines to play with line breaks, like a sort of enjambment napkin doodle. here's one, with as many types of line breaks as I could squeeze into it:
just remembered I wrote a poem about this when I first read it years ago
was working on a ghazal with the key word being "potato" and just rediscovered this gem in my notes for a variant on the word "potato" to keep things in form but also offkey:
I think so often about how arguments against what is "treacly" or "sentimental" are often evidence of a kneejerk reaction to positivity and joy. That what is not easily identifiable as "serious" (like pain and evil) is therefor deemed unserious.