@rodrigo-toscano
Poet, Rhetor, Dialogist. Author of eleven books. National Poetry Series. Best American Poetry. Best Experimental Poetry. Edwin Markham prize. Labor Institute. United Steelworkers. New Orleans Poetry Festival. The Splice reading series. rodrigotoscano.com
For poets like myself unaffiliated to a university, for whom AWP is out of pocket, a pause here to reflect on the outrageous registration fees, exorbitant hotel costs, airlines, steep price of Ubers to offsite readings, etc. Add poverty galore in Baltimore. It's a lot, y'all, to just, woo-hoo!
Poetry in the U.S. ranges from being a pure product of higher education institutions to indy (less commodified) outputs. But they're both productivist endeavors. And so we can talk (straight or slantly) about poets and industrial relations. And about alienation. Infold it into poems even.
Superfluous, presumptuous, indulgent, vain...this is what a lot of non-poet people think of our practices. The ephemerality of it all reminds them of their own superfluous, vain endeavors in the world. We're bent on riding out transformations, passionate about giving them form.
These decasyllabic sonnets in the new issue of Waxwing. I wrote one a day for 100 days straight. Salvage Nation: 100 sonnets will be published in the fall of 2026 by Winter Editions.
waxwingmag.org/items/issue3...
The poets that the interlocking national institutions are currently elevating to be the public face of American Poetry are ill-equipped for this moment in history. Another way to look at it is they're plenty well equipped to act as the cultural attachรฉs of a violent, predatory, decaying empire.
AWP 2026 is fast approaching. Literary endeavors will be validating literary endeavors. That, we can count on. But those endeavors owe everything to extra-literary forces in the world. As always, it will be interesting to see how much of those forces get play there. And how.
"What's happening?" The American-led World Order, its propaganda and official poetries are in full decomposition mode. Empire Center Star System poet structures are buckling. The New Orleans Poetry Festival is flourishing in hundreds of new directions. No fees. No chaff.
The unstated rule of mainstream journals:
No ideological contradictions in the production of Contemporary American Poetry are to be expressed in any way. Poems, however, can rock out on quarks, quasars, extraterrestrial sex habits, and of course, individual salvation.
For decades, I've worked with labor activists, at worksites, on corners, in airy offices, in on-line theory forums, organizations, some social democrats, others communists, many just deeply committed folks. And yet, every single day I sense their souls palpably stunted for lack of poetry. Mine too.
The New York Times is a double dose soporific for those already half asleep dreaming of reviving an Obama era American global hegemony, its cultural fineries in tow, its dinner party manners, its masked up dissimulations. What does that make the NYT's coverage of Contemporary American Poetry?
Also watching poets who have spent their lives appeasing bourgeois cultural institutions for big paybacks. They post their indignity at the current state of affairs while packing their bags for 2-4 week tours spewing the same old me-centered poetics, hogging up bandwidth, hawking redemption.
"Factoids", a sonnet from my fall 2026 book, Salvage Nation. This piece, like many in the collection, explores the dynamic relationship between content and form. Dialectical thinking plays a role even through the most speculative of inquiries.
sixthfinch.com/toscano2.htm...
He died early last year.
American poets about to go ape shit! Hunkering in the dialectic between classes, nations, and empires. Culture oozing from that dialectical clamor. Literature, a subset of culture, poetry, a subset of literature. At the end of the day, *prized* unruly child of the whole shebang.
This Monday - tomorrow, if you're in Pittsburgh, I'm reading with Cate Peebles @ 6:00. Fungus bookstore. 700 1/2 South Trenton Avenue.
I'll be reading poems that intersect with geopolitical realities. But also, my usual working the quirk of lived life ("how it felt like"), without the imperial "I".
Given the present imperialist incursion in Venezuela, reposting this dialogue on metapolitics, cultural-political expansionism, higher Ed and its poetries, "Latinx", Whitman, explorations of decadence. Also great intro to two poetry books.
jacket2.org/interviews/p...
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Grateful after every run I run ๐
"Writing from within the walls of the imperial center" is the title of all forthcoming books from American poets. The rest are quaint subtitles.
Rodrigo Toscano, WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. / @omnidawn.bsky.social @rodrigo-toscano.bsky.social ;
robmclennan.blogspot.com/2025/12/rodr...
"If metapolitics is the seedbed of realpolitik, poetics is the mulch of metapolitics" - RT
Grateful to Fieldnotes for publishing three sonnets from my upcoming book, "Stumbles & Surges (100 sonnets)". At times, I'm inclined to write sonnets in order to zoom out on U.S. national political predicaments, hopefully capturing a slice of the zeitgeist in one shot.
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Thing about working with set syllable counts is you have to aim very steadily to hit the mark, or continously reconsider alternate utterances to match the scheme. Over the years, I've trained myself to hit 90% of lines in one shot. Still, content rules.
www.bloodhoneylit.com/poetry/five-...
Here's "One Like", a sonnet from this last summer (remember the summer?)
www.thecommononline.org/december-202...
Answering nineteen questions about my writing practice on Rob Mclennen's Blog.
robmclennan.blogspot.com/2025/12/12-o...
So grateful for Rob Mclennon's review of my new book!
periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/12/rob-...
"absence" "erasure" "recovery" "interstitiality" "navigation" "presencing" "troubling", hit these institutional tones consistently and you will be rewarded. Critique these, or simply slide past them to build out other paradigms and face censure.
"American Exeptionalism", the worldview, the ideology, spills all the way down into American Poetry Inc. So much of what goes by "personal", "intimate" and "transcendant", is mainly the national subject doubling down on individualism, when what's needed is ๐ฅ๐ช๐ท๐ช๐ฅ๐ถ๐ข๐ญ๐ช๐ด๐ฎ.
Grateful to have "Vibe Shift" in this issue of The Louisville Review. The sonnet is from a new upcoming collection of 100 sonnets, titled, "Stumbles & Surges". "Vibe Shift" is from the section, "Of Polis".