Beatin' Paths

I like to take backroads. At this point, I’ve driven across the country so many times that I’ve made ruts through all the interstates; so, I have to turn off my GPS, and beat my own improvisational path through the map— the Algorithm and Efficiency be damned. Thus I found myself last week weaving a new way through southern Tennessee, and then Mississippi’s Natchez Trace Parkway (along the living path indigenous people once walked.) Here are two very different poems from the wide & wet South.

Wrote this poem the other day at the peak of Fuji Mountain in Oregon, surrounded by 360-degree vistas of the Oregon Cascades. It felt good to write a place-based poem again in my old notebook. For the last few months, most of my poetry has been people-based while busking spontaneous typewriter street poetry. But this poem is more representative of how I became a poet— sitting in nature, channeling the poetry already present in the silence.

I wrote this piece on the unfolding battle between the Trump Administration and the AI company Anthropic as part of my “Tech and Democracy” coverage for The Renovator back in April. Since then, the ongoing drama has only gotten crazier, with news breaking just the . Read my piece to understand this evolving conflict between two of the most powerful entities on earth— it involves a government surveillance panopticon, a digital nuke, and the future of geopolitical hegemony.

Last Saturday, I wrote live typewriter poetry in the window of L’Enfant Gallery in Georgetown. I was there, during Georgetown Art Week, to create a collaborative piece of mixed-media art with my new friend Christina — the event was called “Painting with a Poet.” The poet, in the gallery bathroom. Lookin good.

Half my life, I was hitched to Harvard. Three years where it was my singular dream; three years living that dream in Cambridge the first time; five years as a dropout pursuing a wider dream; and then, finally, one perfect senior year. I got in at 16; I graduated at 26, one year ago. After I graduated, the adventure kept pulling me along, rushing me back & forth across the country. So, I never fully processed what senior year meant to me, or shared pictures from my fantastic senior spring.

Proposing a bipartisan alliance to break the Scarcity Cartel The Land of Opportunity Breaking the Scarcity Cartel Liberty and Abundance Zones The Lacuna of Justice American Pragmatism The Land of Opportunity There are as many American dreams as there are Americans. But the dreams that inspired people from all over the world to journey to the United States share an essential, common image: America as the Land of Opportunity.

Today I went to Dupont Circle in DC to busk typewriter poetry. It was a beautiful Sunday, despite occasional showers; I wrote many Mother’s Day poems, and made many people happy. It was a good day, with a lot of quality poems. This one, though, is my favorite. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

Beauty is fundamentally relational. It requires foreground & background, a view & a viewer, form & not-form, particularity & universality in dialogue. That’s why poetry, poesis— languageitself— is so omnifically beautiful. Language is a massive system of relationality, with so many parameters that it can generate endless dialectical novelty approaching the limits of the universe. Language loves liberty. That’s why LLMs are interesting; and, in similar & different ways, why humans are interesting.

My time in the sequoias in 2022 taught me how to truly listen to nature, listen in the deep way that lets you translate a place into poetry. This poem was the jewel of my time there. Back then, I considered this long poem— broken into sections written at different moments during my week in the seemingly silent sequoias— to be my best poem yet. Ah, to be young! Now, as my poetry has improved over the years, I feel some slight embarrassment at sharing it. But only slight.

I wrote these six poems during my last two weeks camped out in the Sequoia National Forest with a handful of friends in buses and vans. I’d last visited this favorite spot, alone, in 2022, where I wrote Sequoia Poems (2022) and For Mary Oliver. My poetry has grown, as have I, as have the trees.