Rodrigo Toscano

Greetings friends, this Friday and Saturday I'll be reading in Brooklyn and Manhattan. On Sunday, I'll be reading in Philadelphia. Hope to see you!

Dear Friends!

My newest book from Omnidawn Books, written in Late Classical Toscanoese. Several freaked out, culturally hopeful readers have noted the book is reasonably intelligible to readers proficient in Late Empire American English.

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

I think what confuses editors when they encounter my poetry is that I mash up surges in social consciousness with obvious stumbles, wrapping each piece into quirky empanadas of political contradictions. I don't cosmeticize the limits of poetry. Not exactly the current fashion.

My fear is not that poetic activity is futile "in the end", it's that poetic activity (especially in the U.S.) might be acting as yet another accelerant to the atomization of society by boosting excessive individualism, when what's needed is dividualism.

Rodrigo Toscano - poetry — Action, Spectacle

Five news sonnets in Action Spectacle.

Of course each line is ten syllables 😜

www.action-spectacle.com/summer-2025-...

I guess my conception of a poet laureate is somebody who also speaks truth to power, especially when the nation state (empire) that the laureate is under was busy materially supporting mass slaughter.

I hope Sze's tenure isn't as politically inert as our last laureate.

Forever true for me is Frost's gravestone inscription: "I had lover's quarrel with the world"

Generally speaking, I'd say that American Poetry is extremely behind the times in terms of its apprehension of how the National Subject (whether "conservative", "centrist", or "liberal") is faring in the midst of an unspooling Empire. 100, 000 Songs of Myself isn't cutting it.

With everyone bloated with so much information, chained to thousands of clicks per week, wouldn't it be reasonable to ask if poetry (new poetry) can deal with this chronic attention inflammation. It certainly can't just add to it, right?

Shakespeare made up, forged, fancied - however we want to put it, 1,700 words and 400 idioms. And whenever we submit one single poem with one single neologism, we fret that some slush pile reader will think it exceedingly weird, uncouth, instantly dismissable.

60 years from now, poetry readers will be keen in knowing how we managed to weave together the minutest details of our lived experiences with massive global movements in politics, economy and culture. A few readers are going to be enlightened, most though, will be disappointed.

The new Hispano American poetics will deal in the historical contradictions inherent in every perspective, and not with self-validating personhoods afforded by Anglo Imperial atomized "liberations". It will reach deep into new and old humanisms in the re-making of a hemisphere.

Many of our poetic works are not accepted by the classifiers of "narrative poetry", with their scandalously narrow conceptions of "narrative".

At base, narrative is one thing after the next: a poke, a gloss, a swipe, a swat, a rubbing up against, a bumpity bump bump.

I find it life-enriching to think of ancestors - 100 yrs. ago, 10, 000 yrs. ago, what was different then, what is still the same. And at the same time, the trepidations and spontaneous leaps of the present in all its obscured presentess sirens - what goes by the name of - "me".

Are urban poetry "scenes" necessary for a poet's growth? As a hard rule, no. But, for a while, especially for young poets, I'd say, yes. Contending with creative tension between live readers month after month, grows poetic muscles. On the other hand, scenes can become sclerotic.

Young poets these days can't choose to live very modestly (have their own place that's not half their income), work a part time job, and let their imaginations fly. The threat of being crushed is everywhere, including by the field of literature itself. Thus, conformity rules.

Essential for poetics

This is the time when many writing teachers are going back to work, that is, when that industry's smoke stacks emit their first puffs of writerly advice: an odd admixture of experience, wisdom, generosity, and curious, necessary lies to keep all customers happy.

In terms of libinality and poetic achievement, the trail of miraculous (and disastrous) loverships gets imbedded in one's poetic works. Some loverships are imaginary, some are all too real. All seem necessary. Many are not. No matter. It's all about the 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴' "loverships".

Existentially inclined poets too often neglect geopolitical realities, while geopoetic types take an easy pass on existential feelings. I've striven to weave both perspectives into 100 sonnets. Now at the mercy of frontline readers deaf to both modes, let alone their synthesis.

If you're really opposed to U.S. imperialism, consider tactically allying with global forces that materially act as a counter to that system. Short of that, your indignant citizen posturing becomes a mere national sociology absorbed and contained by a market for such "poethics".

A compulsion to say something to somebody, or a compulsion to want to say something despite they're being nobody to say it to. Or the the weirdest (this here): to be saying something that's not flowing from someone per say, but that it gets said.

Nothing like normies praising Haryette Mullen and Rae Armentrout to the heavens, decades after those groundbreaking poets were grinding in the trenches, notably after they established safe harbors in the poetry world, all the while boxing out innovative poetics in the present.

A poetics devoted to:

* syllabic integrity
* a whippy vernacular
* philosophical priors
* wide historical perspectives
* navigating contradictions
* a deep sense of life's finitude
* the searing edges of libidinality
* the necessity of fleeting love
* social progress

With AI lurching around every corner, and the lashings out of a spooled out empire, and the fraying of democratic institutions, all in an ocean of narcissistic copes, especially around the Success of China, is making U.S.A. poetry into a movie set of cardboard sentiments.

The publishing of poems, whether through books or journals (both print and online) is too delayed to mediate the wave crests of the zeitgeist. That's one of the reasons why turbo normie poets thrive in the U.S. scene. The avoidance of material context to expression pays - big.

If writing teachers hunkered down with Bertolt Brecht's poems, and if their students grapsed how those poems differ from idealist (obscurantist) approaches to culture, those students might pivot against their own previous work, and maybe their teacher's too. Happy August preppin.

The poetry reading is people gathering round to hear tales that pertain to them in some way or other. The tale's performers are the words themselves. The "author" is the gatherer of the words. The author has also arrayed the words into specific patterns for various effects.

Humans say this that and the other. So do words themselves. There it is: "poetics". A mad way of life.