Art is the opposite of propaganda. 🧵 1/

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Our new book-length haibun crown is hot off the press! @Katie_Dozier and I wrote these through the month of April, and posted them right here every day. Pick up your copy and help prove you don't have to follow all the antiquated rules to make meaningful books!

Happy to have a few poems curated by Heliosparrow Poetry Journal today, and will have more in the coming days. It was such a compliment to have all the poems I submitted (19) accepted—that’s the first time I’ve ever have that happen! I love their thought-provoking work—meaning

The old page, which I had to manually compile every year using 4 separate sets of old web data is here, and it might help you remember some of your favorites:

Find the new Popular Poems page here:

What rattled us more than Rachel Custer's "How I Am Like Donald Trump"? Only 28 shakes right now, though. Help rescue it from the dustbin of history!

Or who can forget Nathaniel Whittemore's "Death and Tacos" -- the first poem we have had really go viral, way back in the days of "StumbleUpon," if anyone remembers that, pre-Reddit:

Tiana Clark's "Equilibrium," our top RPP winner, still only has 64!

David Kirby's "More Than This" only has 14 shakes right now, for example! A travesty!

Rattle's new website is completely finished now, after deploying one last formatting fix—making the margins variable, so the poems are always in the middle of the screen, no matter how wide the poem or the screen. That was a tricky one! We've also unveiled our Billboard Top

What's subjective in poetry are often post-hoc rationalizations for our visceral reactions. What's objective are the elements that make those reactions possible.

It seems folks are still confused about Jane Hirshfield's assay form as a prompt this week, so I'll talk about it a bit on today's Critique of the Week. Live here at 4pm ET:

Last night on the Rattlecast, we announced Sharon Ferrante as the winning prompt poet of the month, with her goregous sequence "What Happens in Autumn." I've taken to writing up why I chose the prompt poem every month for another site, which I will now share here too. *** My

Critique of the Week | November 7, 2025

Super excited to share the cover for our second haibun crown together! Stay tuned, our chapbook will be out soon—before the next full moon. Tim created this with a picture I took of fences in CA. I’m so lucky to be married to a man that writes incredible poems and crafts such

8/ The guest will be @kaicarlsonwee, who has a follow-up to Rail forthcoming, which is something to be excited about. Looking forward to it!

7/ Next week's prompt from @Katie_Dozier: Write a poem about a time you found yourself somewhere you didn’t belong, but have the poem turn to somewhere that you do. I'm going to write another of these, so I hope you're not sick of them already.

6/ The guest last night was J.R. Solonche, a poet who's always baffled me. I had trouble finding a polite way to say it, but I just have no idea why he hasn't won any major awards and isn't more well-known. https://t.co/ANzAxhxoTm

5/ But maybe there are some ties that linger in the neural bundles of my language modules, because I've always liked these rhythms. So I thought it would be fun to explore that at some point—but lyrically, rather than epically.

4/ One of the things that drew me to play with this form was being at Disney's EPCOT on our honeymoon this spring. Walking through the German area it occurred to me that I'm mostly German in heritage, but I have no connection to anything Germanic. I don't even like the beer!