R.D. Pohl
@rdpohl
Writer, critic, literary journalist, poetry editor. Trained as language philosopher. Follow at POETRY/POETICS/LANGUAGE/COMMUNITY (). Formerly with The Buffalo News, currently The Buffalo Hive, a non-profit arts & culture startup.
Gunshots at a St. Mark's Poetry Project reading in 1968, but don't worry--"it was a benefit shooting" (Kenneth Koch). Excerpt from Joe Dunthorne’s review of Conversations with New York School Poets: Interviews by Yasmine Shamma, edited by Rona Cran& Yasmine Shamma, with contributions by Nick Sturm.
Had to forfeit my UFC catch match tonight because Dana White isn't providing vegan snacks in the dressing room. 😉
Passage from Dan Chiasson's essay "Stop Trying to 'Help Me Write'" in the New York Review of Books: "... we arrive at one of the appropriate emotions for this moment, which is anger. (Another emotion, grief, is waiting close by.)"
This was the final Creeley poem read by @l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e.bsky.social for @justbuffalolit.bsky.social and @ubpoetics.bsky.social on the final evening of the Creeley Centenary Symposium in Buffalo. A person reading this poem could derive an entire poetics from it.
One more page from Creeley, this the last three stanzas from "A Calendar" from Memory Gardens (1979). "...Only us then/ remember, discover / still can care for / the human." @ubpoetics.bsky.social
Juliana Spahr is the recipient of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan University Press).
The Buffalo poetry and Poetics community we now have in this city and much the blue-collar avant-garde sensibility that is the hallmark of the Buffalo arts and cultural community would not exist in its current constellation had Creeley not made this city his home sixty years ago.
Today's haul from Talking Leaves Books. Books by Charles Bernstein and Elizabeth Willis in preparation for the Robert Creeley Centenary events in Buffalo in May. Who else is coming to Buffalo?
R.D. Pohl? Who dat? Big thanks to Edric Mesmer and Yrtemmys Press for this transcription of a 3 hour conversation I had with him in April 2025. It's the latest installment in Yrtremmys Press's Little Book Series, prompted by my forthcoming "Buffalo Poetics and the Rise of a Blue-Collar Avant-Garde."
Thinking of Michael Silverblatt's recent passing and his time in Buffalo reminded of this Robert Hass poem from his 1972 collection "Field Guide" which received the Yale Younger Poets Prize.
This is often referred to as T.S. Eliot's "conversion [to Anglicism] poem." And the 'conversion' it brought about in me was a strong distaste for Eliot.
From 2025 in The Atlantic. As we used to say in epistemology, this is "proof of concept" of a paradigm shift in political economic infrastructure. When the unitary executive of a failed democracy comes for the central bankers, that is a litmus test for the fact that we are living in an autocracy.
1st Just Buffalo Literary Center @justbuffalolit.bsky.social Poem of the Week for 2026: "script eighty-five" by Liz Mariani @lizmariani.bsky.social. This poem first appeared in "Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age — Summer 2025" published by The Chaos Section Poetry Project.
If 2025 was the Year of The Performative Oligarchs, A.I. Slop, and the People Who Want to Put Their Name on Everything, 2026 will be the Year of the Peasants with Pitchforks. Go out to your shed now and sharpen your tines! From these barren soils, we can plant a more promising crop.
To close out 2025 @justbuffalolit.bsky.social, a poem from the archive: John Logan (1923—1987), one of my professors at UB with "Believe It" from 1981. This poem first appeared Only the Dreamer Can Change the Dream: Selected Poems (BOA Editions Ltd.,1981). Next week, we are back to living poets!
LIGHT, a winter solstice and last day of Hanukkah poem by Irving Feldman for Dec. 21 JBLC @justbuffalolit.bsky.social Poem of the Week. This poem was from my personal archives. The source is Irving Feldman's The Pripet Marshes (1961). Irving is 98 now, still active in the community.
The Buffalo Sabres organization is now in that grace period when no one yet knows how to pronounce the new general manager's name. Those two Finnish vowels are called ääkkösets. Might take a whole season for the fan base to learn how to pronounce his name well enough to call for his firing.
The University at Buffalo, where Morton Feldman (1926-1987) was Edgard Varèse Professor of Music Composition from 1973 to 1987, will host a Feldman@100 Celebration featuring talks and concert performances on January 12 & 13th of 2026 at the UB North Campus. Link is in comments.
Public trust in the media in general has hit a new low across the political spectrum, with only 8% of Republicans and 27% of Independents reporting that they placed a"great deal or a fair amount of trust" in the mass media.
Cindy Sherman, from 30 Essex St. in Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center on Buffalo's West Side in 1975 to the cover of The New Yorker's as "Being Eustace" [Tilly] in its "The Culture Industry: A Centenary Issue" a half century later.
Nick Sturm : "The Poetry Foundation invited me to write an essay remembering Alice Notley (1945-2025). I'm grateful for the space to remember her in this way." Link in comments.
Buffalo-based poet Rachelle Toarmino's second full-length collection of poems HELL YEAH drops in October from Third Man Books. Link to purchase in comments.
Easy to make jokes about Elon's hubris, but if Neuralink is going to hack the human limbic system— the complex network of brain structures located deep within the brain, responsible for emotions, memory, motivation, and behavior—then we are talking about more than AI superintelligence.
With the Smithsonian brought to heel, guess the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities are probably next up for an ideological purge. In that likelihood, who among us would even want to apply for a grant?
If social media is dead, then somehow Meta harvested $62.36 billion in 2024 in net profits from the corpse. Meta's defense in the FTC anti-trust case against it is that it can’t possibly have a monopoly on personal social networking—because personal social networking no longer meaningfully exists.
Fight Club but for Humanoid Robots! Performance artist Chris Burden anticipated this in the 1980's, but I'd rather see this on the White House lawn on July 4th of next year rather than the UFC fight that Trump is planning. Would be more attuned to the Zeitgeist.