From a distance, most things look beautiful

sean, queer, nyc

[on-poetry]

About me: Queer poet and storyteller. From Wisconsin, went to school in Florida, currently live in NYC. (Writers in the city, let’s chat!)

My Newsletter: Subscribe for prompts, essays, and inspiration on all things poetry! https://poemancer.beehiiv.com/subscribe

My poetry group: If you’re an LGBTQ+ poet in the NYC area, come write with me in Lower Manhattan every first and third Saturday of the month. Join my poetry group here! https://www.meetup.com/poets-out-loud/

My writing school: Writers.com is the oldest writing school on the internet and I’ve been incredibly blessed to run it alongside my boss since 2020. If you’re looking to take classes in poetry, fiction, CNF, and beyond, feel free to DM me with questions. I also run and write a blog on writing craft, find it here!

My writing: You can find a full list of publications at seanglatch.com.

Instagram: @glatchkeykid (don’t laugh, it’s new)

[ssegundosombra]

Sean Bonney, Further Notes on Militant Poetics

[frankencain]

Signalis (2022) [H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival] /Sagittarius A* / Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates / Outer Wilds (2020) / Is There a God-Shaped Hole at the Heart of Mathematics? / Drain for overflowing water at Sambuco Dam, Lavizzara Valley / ? / Thomasin Frances, Hole Theory (15/10/2022) / Bryan’s Ground, a public garden in Herefordshire on the Welsh border. / odd, weird, strange and unusual / Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves / Evil (2019-2014) / Judas H., Overflowing With Empty / Illustration of the Annular Eclipse of 1836 from “A fourteen weeks course in descriptive astronomy”, Joel Dorman Steele (1836-1886) / @imdad_barbhuyan on Instagram / The moon’s Copernicus crater. Through magic glasses. 1890. / Kaveh Akbar / Dune (2021) / x / Dmitry Kochanovich, Epiphany (Russian,b. 1972) / The Silt Verses, Chapter 41: But As My Last Breath Splits My Throat / Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, The Camp is a Bait for Time / Darina Muravjeva, Hole / Hilde Heynen in Heterotopia and the City / x / Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers / x /  Louise Glück, from Descending Figure / Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. / Caitlyn Siehl, What We Buried; from “A Letter To Love” / Lara de Moor, Orb (2014) / Sam Sax, Pig / The National - Wake Up Your Saints / Aleksander Rostov / Sanna Wani, from “Princess Mononoke (1997)”, My Grief, the Sun / Gregory Orr, [i want to go back] / Thomas Ott / ? / Judas H., Overflowing With Empty / James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room / Massive sinkhole swallows house in Florida / Edna St Vincent Millay, in Letters (1952) /Silent Hill 4 (2004) / @/vren-diagram / Anne Boyer, What Resembles the Grave But Isn’t / Law of Holes / Scarlet Hollow (2021) / China Miéville, from Railsea

(part one)

[ssegundosombra]

"Poetry and mathematics. The black stone structure breaks and you see yourself in a saturation of lights, a clear-cut unhoped-for. A clear-cut unhoped-for was what he felt and understood at the top of that small hill. But he didn't see shapes or lines, didn't see contours or lights, he was invaded by colors, life, a flashless dazzling, dense, comely, a sunburst that was not fire. He was invaded by incommensurable meaning. He could say only that. Invaded by incommensurable meaning."

Hilda Hilst, With My Dog Eyes (trans. by Adam Morris)

[havingapoemwithyou]

Stop Me if  You’ve Heard This One Before by Kaveh Akbar

[flopstat]

i think abt anne rice’s answer to “what are your work habits for a novel?” probably every single day

[flopstat]

[postarcadian]

also re: Ezra Pound's disgust at the "fleshiness" of D.H. Lawrence's poetry and that of the pre-Raphaelites, this is obviously not an original thought but I think it's interesting to note that the treatment of art and literature as a problem of optimization and the promotion of the idea that good literature and good art is about ruthlessly "cutting" whatever is "unnecessary" is itself an impulse that essentially applies the logic of eugenics to aesthetic theory. and so it's no surprise that Pound, arguably the most notorious fascist of 20th century Anglophone lit, is voicing said critique, and it's interesting that fascists' disgust at "fleshiness" (and its near-synonym "flabbiness") is still a cornerstone of modern fascism that links their artistic theory to their sexual politics and to what might seem like more fringe fascist phenomena like looksmaxxing and fatphobia etc etc

[geryone]

Judas Goat, Gabrielle Bates

[iwrotemrtambourineman]

the kookaburras by mary oliver

[on-poetry]

So beyond happy to have my stroke-of-insanity horse poem published at HAD, the best home I could possibly imagine for it.

[havingapoemwithyou]

Third sonnet by Tawanda Mulalu

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Writing exercise from the wonderful Stephen Dunn in The Practice of Poetry, ed.s Robin Behn and Chase Twichell (William Morrow, 2013).

[headlightsforever]

Well, I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I’d say I wrote poetry; I wouldn’t go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn’t just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect. Poetry does so many different things, it’s difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to culture. It can range from being stories of the tribe to the private lyric, to being “the clear expression of mixed feelings” (Auden) to nonsense verse. For me, it articulates and enacts the difficult-to-say, the half-known; it finds a music and a shape, offers an arrangement, if you will, of words and sentences that better approximate the way things are.

Stephen Dunn

[child-in-her-eyes]

[neoyorzapoteca]

Susan Howe

[sawasawako-archived]

hanif abdurraqib literally gets it…

[carvalhais]

‘Stories’ on social media, which are in fact mere self-promotion, separate people from each other. Unlike narratives, they produce neither closeness nor empathy. In the end, they are information adorned with images — information that is briefly registered and then disappears. The stories do not narrate; they advertise. Vying for attention does not create community. In the age of storytelling as storytelling, narration and advertisement become indistinguishable, That is the current crisis of narration.  Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

[acertainknot]

The common task of knowing the world is getting farther and farther out of reach.

Wark, M. (2026) ‘Editorial: “Intellectuals”’, e-flux, 163. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/163/6776897/editorial-intellectuals (Accessed 4 June 2026).