Nick Sturm

it's time to disrupt the notebook industry by bringing back palimpsesting

huge Ron Padgett flex

Higher ed’s rush to adopt AI with Justin Raden - American Campus Podcast grift, edtech, enshittificationReferences and suggested readings:Justin Raden. October 23, 2025. Higher Ed’s Rush to Adopt AI is About So Much More Than AI. Defector. American Vandal podcast and ...

A huge thanks to @llassabe.bsky.social for inviting me to spend some time talking about AI in higher ed on American Campus!

Excellent piece by comrade @jraden.bsky.social

going to give myself a treat & read my Something Else Press edition of The Making of Americans once I finish writing this book

Yes--obsessed with Denby !! via Notley (see her essay "Edwin's Lines), Berrigan, & O'Hara. I collect copies of Denby's Full Court Press book Collected Poems as a kind of lark--many have wild associations & traces of Denby lore in them. I'll write an essay about it some day.

www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158...

I did it. I went on a podcast to talk about the Best American Poetry. It's a new show, Bad Art, about the politics of art in the 21st century--& it's a lot of fun.

Happy holidays to everyone thinking beyond the horizon of the canonical!

Alice Notley's Symphonic Everything - Cleveland Review of Books The sometimes garrulous, sometimes insolent, sometimes exuberant New York School style that the beginning part of her career largely lived within was not her go-to poetic mode in the last decades of h...

Jeff Alessandrelli's essay remembering Alice Notley at @clereviewbooks.bsky.social is really moving & so full of Alice's presence.

In the background of Jeff's piece is another story: small press publishing changes our lives & our shared world.

clereviewofbooks.com/alice-notley...

Back cover of Rebecca Kosick's Dispatches from the Avant-Garage with blurbs: "Marvelous to see these ephemeral bookmarks, broadsides, and cards made permanent and in living color. Kosick captures the uncollectible soul of the Alternative Press: its DIY ebullience, samizdat ethos, Detroit politics, and postal poetics. Ken and Ann Kikolowski didn't just run a press; they assembled a rollicking crew of poets and artists. Kosick is the perfect chronicler of this whooping barn dance of an archive in process, which bursts well-wrought urns. Dispatches from the Avant-Garage afürms that poetry can't be standardized but it can be set loose." -Charles Bernstein, author of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies "This is the definitive book on Ann and Ken Mikolowski's brilliantly uncatalogable Alternative Press, the thirty-year Midwestern publishing project whose experiments in poetry postcards, broadsides, bumper stickers, and more lent American poetry new intermedial forms. Incisive, companionable, and driven by Kosick's indexical archival knowledge, Dispatches from the Avant-Garage is a print culture poetry dream. The bumper sticker for this book should read: 'Nothing is ephemeral."" -Nick Sturm, author of Publishing the New York School: Small Press Communities and American Poetry "In this impeccably researched, sumptuously illustrated book, Rebecca Kosick dives into the wreck of the archive, uncovering a fascinating secret history of post-1945 American poetry and art through one radical, inventive small press with an unlikely home base In Detroit, far from the coasts. The Alternative Press 'will outlast the auto industry,' Allen Ginsberg once proclaimed and thanks to Kosick's lively, meticulous recovery project, it just might." --Andrew Epstein, author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American

Grateful beyond words to have these gorgeous, generous blurbs from Charles Bernstein, Andrew Epstein, and @nicksturm.bsky.social with me on the back cover of Dispatches from the Avant-Garage + more beautiful blurbs from John Yau and William Barillas inside (copied into comments below) 😭

Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Preface: Editors' Note on the Now Introduction Caroline Gelmi and Lizzy LeRud Part 1: How We Think About Poems 1. A Conversation on Dinétics Esther G. Belin and Jake Skeets 2. Post-Craft Michael Leong 3. Unsettling Modernist Poetry Erin Kappeler 4. Legacies of Empire in the Western Poetic Line: The Problem of Caesura Heather H. Yeung 5. Unpacking the Interpretive Toolbox: Historical Poetics in Introductory Courses Caroline Gelmi 6. "I hear it now"; or, Teaching Students to Read Poems in Novels Annelise Chick and Gabrielle Stecher 7. Moving "Rooms" Across Borders: Putting Pressure on the Stanza Reem Abbas and Heather H. Yeung

8. Under the Sonnet's Menace: Helping Students Navigate Race, Constraint, and Rage in the Post-Romantic Sonnet Anton Vander Zee 9. Rawest Radical Material: Teaching Poetry's Diction William Fogarty 10. Reading, Misreading, and Rereading "We Real Cool" Mike Chasar Part 1 Cluster: Ideas on Teaching Lyric 11. Retheorizing Lyric via the Pedagogy of Eighteenth-Century Antislavery Poetry Chris Chan 12. Lyric Borders: Reading and Writing with Gloria Anzaldúa's New Mestiza Leah Huizar 13. Lorenzo Thomas's Griot Lyric: Reading Persona and Race in the Digital Age Lukas Moe 14. Lyric After Lyricization: Learning and Unlearning the Lyric / in the Activist Classroom Anastasia Nikolis Part 2: What We Do With Poems 15. Poetry as Empathetic Praxis: Black Poetics and the Creative Writing Classroom Monique-Adelle Callahan D.

16. Performing Desire: Collaborating with Sex Worker Poets in the Composition Classroom Philippa Chun 17. Oral Poetries Are (Not) Lost to Us: Ethnopoetics in the Digital Age Kenneth Sherwood 18. Against Mastery: Working Through the Desire for Order in Teaching M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! Jess A. Goldberg 19. Future-Facing Archives: Phillis Wheatley Peters and the Intertextual Poetic Past Sarah Nance 20. Cultivating a Culture of Enjoyment in the Poetry Classroom Rachel B. Griffis 21. Reframing Modernism: Creative Composition and the Analysis of Modernist Poetry at an HBCU Candis Pizzetta 22. Whose Voice Matters? Reading Aloud Across Language and Ability Eileen Sperry 23. Reimagining the Poet's Procedure: Imitation as Literary Analysis Lizzy LeRud 24. From Stifling to Expansive: Reimagining Poetry Teaching and Learning with The South African Poetry Project Sooriagandhi Naidoo, Toni Gennrich, and Eunice Phiri

25. Transgressive Teaching and Subverting Censorship in the Dual-Credit Classroom Ronnie K. Stephens 26. The Florence Poetry Collective: Death Row as a Site of Poetic Production and Expressive Sovereignty Joe Lockard Part 2 Cluster: Project-Based Learning 27. Engaging Poetry: The Review as Critique and Conversation Victoria Chang and Dean Rader 28. City, State, and Self: A Collaborative Book Project James Innis McDougall 29. Experimental Indexes: Quantifying Poetic Patterns and Project-Based Reading Nick Sturm 30. Teaching Anti-Racist Research Practices Beyond Research Papers: Emma Lazarus, Esther Schor, and My First-Year Composition Students Mollie Barnes 31. Student Research, Digital Humanities, and Cross-Campus Collaboration: Building Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde Susan Rosenbaum, Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda A. Kinnahan List of Contributors

I’ve been super excited to share this. The full TOC for TEACHING POETRY NOW, ed by Caroline Gelmi and Lizzy LeRud, is online & chock full of assignments, experiences, and resources from a range of college classrooms. Out in Feb, available for preorder now.

sunypress.edu/Books/T/Teac...

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

us06web.zoom.us/j/8104008381...

Starting in a few minutes!!

Tonight at 8pm EST--a free online event with Stephanie Anderson, Patricia Spears Jones, Maureen Owen, & MC Hyland hosted by @nysnetwork.bsky.social. Register via the link!

www.eventbrite.com/e/women-in-i...

Turns out everyone on Twitter were from like a few countries outside the US.

Meanwhile, most of BlueSky is from the greatest country in the world: Philadelphia

Monday night at 8pm--join the Network for New York School Studies with Maureen Owen, Patricia Spears Jones, & Stephanie Anderson about the book WOMEN IN INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING

Register here for the free online event!!

www.eventbrite.com/e/women-in-i...

Monday night at 8pm--join the Network for New York School Studies with Maureen Owen, Patricia Spears Jones, & Stephanie Anderson about the book WOMEN IN INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING

Register here for the free online event!!

www.eventbrite.com/e/women-in-i...

Seeing the Future: A Conversation with Alice Notley Conversations with poets, editors, and artists.

Revisiting @nicksturm.bsky.social’s 2017 interview with Alice Notley after a really special Notley memorial event at the Poetry Project last night—what gifts; what a life poetrysociety.org/poems-essays...

The New School is now a place where students cannot major in History, Anthropology, Sociology, Global Policy & International Affairs, Global Studies, Urban Studies, or Environmental Studies. And more pauses, closures, and mergers coming down the pike this week. The future is uncertain.

"academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it... The dominant four collectively generated... $12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024."

Coming out of very fun conversation on Saturday and I would like to announce that it is wonderful to read and think about Stitch, Unstitch by @kristingrogan.bsky.social, which helps us shape the modernist canon in relation to how poets engage everyday, ordinary labor.

so rad!

E. Gordon Gee, 'universities have become isolated and arrogant'. By Evan Goldstein and Len Gutlin. Subhed: the former university president on how the sector got into trouble.

Lmao fuck yooouuuu

Our libraries are cutting staff so that Elsevier can have its 32% profit margin

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

my library bought @kristingrogan.bsky.social ’s beautiful book and yours should too

one of the best experiences as a scholar is reading one sentence--here, Dan tying the professionalization of creative writing to the formation of the NEA--about which you're preparing to write an entire book.

Sociology and Allegory The question of the relationship between internal and external analysis of literature remains open across disciplinary inquiries. Although Pierre Bourdieu claims to offer a definitive answer to the qu...

For the haters who say Big Fiction over-relies on allegory, my most explicit, spirited defense of allegorical interpretation. "Sociology and Allegory," published as part of a series on the sociology of literature in IASL. Lemme know if you want a PDF
www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

I was interviewed by Lisa Regan on the The Academic Publishing Podcast about publishing finances -- everything from why a press might want a subvention to why the system as a whole in in big trouble if everyone goes for the free pdf and no one is paying for the books themselves. She had smart Q's!

AAUP-provided STC is the real path to student success