On holding a horse’s head at five a.m.
My piece for Clarion #4
This is the piece of mine that'll be appearing in Clarion #4 in a few weeks' time.
You may have seen a previous version of this, but I've worked it a bit for the magazine, and for MOLOK, the collection that'll be coming out in June, with the help of my editor for this issue, MariJean Wegert aka
. Thanks MJ!Clarion #4 is launching online on May 8th. Tickets are free and many of the poets will be reading their work. I'll be keeping things rolling and I'd love to see you there. See the Clarion website for the details - https://clarionpoetry.com/events/
I know I’m not around much at the moment. Clarion work is thick on the ground, but I’m also finally managing to disentangle some of the more pernicious binding to social media. And Substack is now very much social media. Let’s all just go back to the blogs, or to letters nailed to fenceposts. Better still, poems whispered into one anothers’ ears while the moon rises and the technofascists race to the stars in a shower of sparks and then silence. In the meantime, though, here’s what I’m still on about.
I am trying to keep Substack from becoming social media in two specific ways: 1. my default “homepage” is my inbox, not the home screen with people’s notes. I try to avoid notes. 2. I reset my inbox to sort by publication date, not “priority,“ which is their new algorithmic guess for what I want to read. And I reset it to present as a list, not their new pictographic grid.
Also, I don’t have notifications turned on. Basically, I resist every new feature they release that gets away from the original look and feel of Substack. It’s important to me – I find good ideas and writers here. But I worked hard, years ago, to pull the needle of social media out of my arm, and I don’t want to go back down that dark road. We shall see.
Tom, this is the best kind of gut punch...love this one viscerally <3