Eric Elshtain

Verge poet Eric Elsthain will be reading with Brandon Kilbourne at 57th Street Books in Chicago on Friday, November 14 at 4PM. semcoop.com/event/afternoo…

For those in the Chicago Area, poetic science and scientific poetry. Friday November 14th, 4pm. @57thstreetbooks semcoop.com/event/afternoo… @GraywolfPress @VergeBooksChi

@nicholascarrigg Not enough orange.

People in 1978 were like: "Yup, exactly what I was going for: all the colors a hibernating toad might experience on a drizzly November day in a hollow log."

@Freak0fNature__ Tough. But fair.

connor wong when it comes to selling

@JoyceCarolOates Is "Rhyming" distinguishable from "rhyming"? Like "Catholic" versus "catholic"?

most universities & colleges surely have faculty members who are contrarians? liberals & progressives are always quarreling with one another; "the left eats its own"; hiring conservatives per se will result in very lop-sided resumés especially in the sciences. really, research universities should hire physicists who disbelieve in modern physics? anthropologists who believe that "Aryans" are the master race? poets who believe in Rhyming? philosophers who are staunch Thomists, or believe in the Creation? historians who don't acknowledge slavery in the US? what a clown show, a sort of campus "Book of Mormon."

@DepartureJay Thank you!

@eric_elshtain Love it.

Draft #20--composed and revised in the Field Museum's Hall of Birds--the real poem may well begin in stanza six...??

@SUEtheTrex A true murder bird!

Good morning, critters.

@jorie_graham I attended a Fanny Howe lecture at the University of Chicago. We all sat at the stolid intellectual table. Howe pressed “play” on a boombox and she sat there silently reading along with a recording she made of her talk. It was confusing and delightful.

Two about science/art and art/science. Of all the amazing aspects of the Field Museum, I think I have written most about the dioramas and Quetzalcoatlus...

Three days, thirty cat poems. One of my favorites is about two cats named Spatula and Plunger. A few lines, based on the humans' description of the cats, read: sometimes your minds seem as inert as the objects you're named after...

@SketchesbyBoze As a poet, I humbly suggest that a firm understanding of simple mathematical, statistical, and scientific principles would be a great place to start... E.g., the difference between correlation and causation.

No offense but I think we underestimate how many of our current problems, culturally and politically, are downstream of the decline in learning, the decline in critical thinking and the loss of interest in the humanities.

@paleobyliam I remember seeing enormous earth-moving equipment at a coal site in Wyoming, thinking I'd finally seen a moving object akin to some of the biggest sauropods.

Making paleoart, especially of dinosaurs, inevitably means having to render massive living things for which we don't have good analogues. 🧵 of images that I think effectively convey large size. Starting with a classic by Wayne Barlowe

Needs some revision--but a first draft of the possible origin story for a paleontologist.

@DepartureJay "No man with a good car needs to be justified."

100th birthday today for the strange and great and flawed Flannery O’Connor.

New draft of a poem based on several conversations about birds with Field Museum visitors. Typed on my 1929 Smith Corona 4.

@rod_lampard Is is possible that an equally divisive brand of identity politics is now embraced by certain corners of the Right?

From “Civil War Comes to the West,” written by David Betz, in 2023. Essentially he goes on to say the consequences of Identity Politics - pushed by Marxian Woke critical theory - is an inevitable civil war. As I've said, building on the work of the late Jean Bethke Elshtain, the West cannot survive what muliticulturalism allows. militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-…

It's the Year of the Snake...so here's a snaky one.

Thank you to Haley for her love of mollusks. We also had a fascinating discussion about Watergate and the historical patterns of distrust in government. That part of our conversation colored this poem in political tones.

It's been a little while--but here's a poem written for a long-time Field Museum volunteer. Mary provided the content, I added an idea and sculpted it into a poem...