Jake Sheff

I'm very excited my first play was published today! It's about being brothers, in verse, & written for reading. Also included are 3 short poems: on war dogs, glaciers & the financial sector. The entire new issue is incredible!! Thank you @ScarletLeafMag scarletleafreview.com/poems15/catego…

@BretVDB @TheLincoln Culture is a reason to live. Mankind giving that up is akin to suicide or self-jailing. Won’t happen.

“Overpopulation in literature has gone beyond Malthusian dimensions, and soon the world’s computers will enhance a Noah’s flood of productivity. If I live long enough, I fully expect individual computers themselves to declare their possession of personality and genius, and to bombard me with the epics and romances of artificial intelligence.” —Harold Bloom, “Foreword: Northrop Frye in Retrospect”

@ihtesham2005 Love the “near miss” concept

A MIT professor taught the same lecture every January for 40 years, and every single time it was standing room only. I watched it at 2am and it completely rewired how I think about communication. His name was Patrick Winston. The lecture is called "How to Speak." His opening line hit like a truck: your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas in that order. Not your GPA. Not your pedigree. Not your IQ. How you speak is what separates people who get heard from people who get ignored. Here's the framework he drilled into MIT students for four decades. He said never start with a joke. Start by telling people exactly what they're going to learn. Prime the pump before you pour anything in. He called it the "empowerment promise" give people a reason to stay in their seats within the first 60 seconds. Then he broke down the 5S rule for making ideas stick: Symbol, Slogan, Surprise, Salient, and Story. Every idea worth remembering hits at least three of these. The part that floored me was his "near miss" technique. Don't just show what's right show what almost looks right but isn't. That contrast is when the brain actually locks something in permanently. His final rule before any big talk: end with a contribution, not a summary. Don't recap what you said. Tell people what you gave them that they didn't have before they walked in. I've used this framework in pitches, interviews, and presentations ever since watching it, and the results are not subtle. Patrick Winston passed away in 2019, but this lecture is still free on MIT OpenCourseWare. One hour, watched by millions, and it costs absolutely nothing. The most important class MIT ever put on the internet isn't about code or math. It's about how to make people actually listen to you.

@PAHoyeck My good friend, Marat Grinberg, is a scholar who studies him. Formerly of Reed, heading to Creighton. You might want to look up some of his articles!

Welp, just finished reading Solaris for the first time. Pretty sure I'll ever be happy again.

@unummagnumtotum Composed and submitted on the same day? Good luck!

Composed a poem today and fired it off to a little contest. Made whole my soul, such an exertion.

Only two weeks left to submit. - Poetry - Flash Prose or Micro Series (750 to 1250 words) - Literary Fiction (1250 to 5500 words) - Speculative Fiction (1250 to 5500 words)

@MerriamWebster @ae_stallings You know what this post required? Courage.

‘Rage’ and ‘outrage’ aren’t etymologically related. ‘Rage’ is from the Latin ‘rabere’ (to be mad). ‘Outrage’ is from Anglo-French ‘utrage’ (insult), from Latin 'ultra' (beyond). We hope this doesn’t make you mad.

@goodreads But I admit “the Bible” always sounds like too easy of an answer when it comes to questions of books and the best, etc.

@goodreads The friendship between Jonathan and David is very realistic in how it portrays a good one. The biggest source of contention lies between them: who will be future king. This is the inequality of inequalities, and out of love for each other (and G-d), they choose to overlook it.

Which book perfectly captures friendship?

I created a graph to explain everything

@BeckyLTuch 95% of anything is daft. If you avoid the slop, you’re avoiding almost all of your contemporaries, and you will have few (if any) literary friends.

The thing is, writers can create original work that sounds just like AI. This is a problem. If we read it, we absorb it. I just had this experience: A writer submitted an essay to me. I asked her if she used AI because it read like she did. She said Yes. I asked her to please rewrite the piece in her own voice. She thanked me for the encouragement, and did so. When she came back with the revised draft, it STILL sounded like AI. I asked for another revision. This time, she said she couldn't take it any further. It WAS her own voice, in this later draft. She didn't know how to make it sound more like herself. I believe her. I just think her "own voice" unwittingly imitated AI in this later draft. Point being, this is quite messy & complicated business. Read great literature, so you absorb that, and not the slop everywhere. (Though the slop is legit hard to avoid!)

Has anyone here read Samuel Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in its entirety?

@JoshPhillipsPhD Those books are the most feigning!

Time to get serious. Get yourself the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Watch the plays on YouTube. Listen to audio. Follow along with the text. Study free lectures online. These works will die if we do not get them deep into our bones.

Do people think Wallace Stevens was sincere? 😆

I’m truly grateful to have three poems included in the spring release by the always wonderful Zeroes Garden. It’s an honor to have this little trio published alongside so many talented writers and so much beautiful visual art. Link: zeroesgarden.com

@amjuster @pauljpastor “Everyone has feelings.” Nobody with the ability to do so is currently willing to champion the individual talent. Self-promotion is legion.

@amjuster @pauljpastor “The downfall of classical ideals made all men potential artists, and therefore bad artists. When art depended on solid construction and the careful observance of rules, few could attempt to be artists, and a fair number of these were quite good. But…”

"We Need to Rescue #Poetry" by @amjuster: nationalreview.com/magazine/2026/…

@amjuster @pauljpastor “…when art, instead of being understood as creation, became merely an expression of feelings, then anyone could be an artist, because everyone has feelings.” Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet Ego is always there. It’s hard for writers to recognize talent outside of themselves.

@Devlinside123 @BarneysRubble0 @JoyceCarolOates AI

Review:infinite jest A book whose rating has see-sawed more than any other. Does it have brilliance and bravissimo coupled with indulgence and logorrhea - Yes. Wallace does what writers like Mailer and Elroy have done by showing other writers a new way to write. Essentially opening up stylistic or thematic or POV choices that felt either to strange, unique, or unremittingly solipsistic. Even though I rate the novel as only 2 stars I feel real sadness over the man's suicide and the loss of what was a uniquely talented writer. Jest is a grandiose, sprawling work that follows many characters, almost all strange and tortured, through about a year of the life in a northern town held in the grip of a dystopian, farcical future. The plot is more a meta construct of witnessing the first 300 pages of batty characters and getting the slight twinge that this author means to wind these disparate threads together. The plot therefore is more about the writer fulfilling that idea then what goes on the actual story. I will save anyone the recitation of the many characters and their various human failings, which are many, dark, sordid, and sometimes movingly real, phantasmagoric, and gaspingly funny. I would like to say that if an editor cut this book down to 500 pages and tossed out the endnotes the novel would be far better for the excision, but there's something definitely Wallace in his granular, microscopic examination of feeling s and scenes that needs to be read. Jest is a book that screams don't look at the story so much as look at me the writer. Narcissistic as that is I don't believe Wallace was doing this out of egoism but simply writing in the only way he knew how -- erudite to painful lengths and focused like a boy lensing an ant on any ripple in the emotional landscape of his characters. Someone said an unexamined life is not worth living. I'm sure Wallace would agree, but moreover, I don't think Wallace could imagine writing a life that wasn't so omphalos(that's for Wallace) oriented. Most if they're honest will read this book to say they read this book: Ulysses, War and Peace, Atlas Shrugged come to mind as well. To them I say you will not be disappointed and to the rest - the neophyte, the dilettante, the wannabe I would say, you won't finish.

Did you know Cormac McCarthy stopped reading new novels after Infinite Jest and referred to @JoyceCarolOates as "the goggle lady?" My definitive takedown of Jest, MFAs, and the coinage of a new term "publishing-inudstrial complex" to explain it all :) unherd.com/2026/03/why-co…

@QuoteNietzsche A million. Conversations aren’t plays or poems. They’re generally tame and slightly boring. That historical person is going to talk to you like the stranger you are.

PFPOI’s first issue of the year is out! We are delighted to bring you poems and translations by 29 poets from every inhabited continent on Earth. Read the issue and download a free, shareable PDF: pfpoi.blogspot.com/p/march-2026-i….