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Ben Roberts

@burrplays.bsky.social

12 followers 23 following 93 posts

They/him.

Working through Oklahoma, hopeful future academic.

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Ben Roberts @burrplays.bsky.social · Apr 27

The wedding is over, now the honeymoon can begin!

Friends, family, you can check on this thread periodically for updates!

Reposted by Ben Roberts

Tom Snarsky

@tomsnarsky.bsky.social

William Stafford

SOME NIGHT AGAIN

When the world vanishes, I will come back
here by the power of my dreams and create it
again, starting where that clear
depth in the mountain lake began,
where you swam one night across the moonlight
and I thought: Still, it’s good, though it has to end.

July 26, 2025 at 10:59 PM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

Cat Manning

@catacalypto.bsky.social

absolutely nails it. the work of language in the age of mechanical reproduction I guess

Jaime Green @jaimealyse.bsky.social · Jul 27

Shit @rusty.todayintabs.com nailed it www.todayintabs.com/p/we-need-to...

July 28, 2025 at 1:11 AM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen.bsky.social

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

-Wisława Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning” (t. Cavanagh & Barańczak)
#everynightapoem #war

The End and the beginning
After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick themselves up, after all.
Someone has to shove the rubble to the roadsides so the carts loaded with corpses can get by.
Someone has to trudge through sludge and ashes, through the sofa springs, the shards of glass, the bloody rags.
Someone has to lug the post to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window, set the door in its frame.
No sound bites, no photo opportunities, and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone to other wars.
The bridges need to be rebuilt, the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled to shreds.
286
Someone, broom in hand, still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding his unshattered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby who'll find all that a little boring.
From time to time someone still must dig up a rusted argument from underneath a bush and haul it off to the dump.
Those who knew
what this was all about must make way for those who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.
Someone has to lie there in the grass that covers up the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth, gawking at clouds.

June 22, 2025 at 2:17 AM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

Tobias Wilson-Bates

@phdhurtbrain.bsky.social

This article is going to turn me into the Joker. Literary style is not a puzzle you solve to get a little information treat 😩😩😩

But A.I. can also simplify: if you’re struggling with the opening of “Bleak House,” you can ask for it to be rewritten using easier, more modern English. “Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.”

June 21, 2025 at 9:54 PM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

Simone de Rochefort

@doomquasar.bsky.social

hi you should read this it is very scary amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...

Diabolus Ex Machina

This Is Not An Essay

amandaguinzburg.substack.com

June 4, 2025 at 4:56 PM

Ben Roberts

@burrplays.bsky.social

The wedding is over, now the honeymoon can begin!

Friends, family, you can check on this thread periodically for updates!

April 27, 2025 at 10:20 AM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen.bsky.social

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.

—
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

“Paul Robeson” by the great Gwendolyn Brooks
#everynightapoem #blackhistorymonth

Paul Robeson
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS
That time
we all heard it, cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words devout and large,
that we are each other's harvest:
we are each other's business:
we are each other's magnitude and bond.

February 5, 2025 at 10:34 PM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen.bsky.social

Best Larkin is not cynical Larkin, imo

—
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Philip Larkin, 'The Mower'
#everynightapoem

Also: found poetry at Harris Teeter, spotted by a friend

The Mower
BY PHILIP LARKIN
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

“we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time. -Philip Larkin” inscribed on a lemon, found in the grocery store fruit aisle

November 28, 2024 at 3:37 PM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

Dr. Han VanderHart

@hanvanderhart.bsky.social

They say blues is three chords and the truth—

And poetry is long-lined lies and a deep dive
into the body's costly river.

Jan Beatty

The Body's River

I was born for betrayal—
When my mother left me in the orphanage,

I invented love with strangers.
And if it wasn't there, I made it be there,

until the crash, the revelation.
They say blues is three chords and the truth—

And poetry is long-lined lies and a deep dive
into the body's costly river.

Dragstripping by Jan Beatty

for which I double parked in brunch traffic and dashed into my local to retrieve

January 25, 2025 at 6:42 PM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen.bsky.social

Can I get used to it day after day
a little at a time while the tide keeps
coming in faster

——
endless patience will never be enough
the only hope is to be the daylight

W.S. Merwin, "Living With The News"
#everynightapoem

Living with the News
Can I get used to it day after day
a little at a time while the tide keeps
coming in faster the waves get bigger
building on each other breaking records
this is not the world that I remember
then comes the day when I open the box
that I remember packing with such care
and there is the face that I had known well
in little pieces staring up at me
it is not mentioned on the front pages
but somewhere far back near the real estate
among the things that happen every day
to someone who now happens to be me
and what can I do and who can tell me
then there is what the doctor comes to say
endless patience will never be enough
the only hope is to be the daylight

January 20, 2025 at 9:32 PM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen.bsky.social

see full interview at @theparisreivew.bsky.social
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3...

INTERVIEWER

You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

JOAN DIDION

It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

December 24, 2024 at 4:50 AM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

1000xRESIST | Available Now

@sunsetvisitor.studio

❄️ A SPECIAL 1000xRESIST GIVEAWAY ❄️

An anonymous fan has bought 10 copies of 1000xRESIST to GIVEAWAY!!

In their own words: "A random act of kindness that maybe, hopefully, finds the right person." 🥹

To enter:

1. Follow us
2. Repost this.
3. Comment "Hekki Holidays"

Winners TBA on Dec 24, 2024.

December 23, 2024 at 8:32 PM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen.bsky.social

Perhaps/
a woman I do not know/
is facing the day with the heavy heart/
that, by all rights, should have been mine.

-Lisel Mueller (1924-2020), "In November"
one of my favorite poems by Mueller, who, as a young teen, left Germany for the US in 1939.
#everynightapoem

IN NOVEMBER
Outside the house the wind is howling and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story with its old beginning, as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee and the radio brings us music from a confident age. In the paper bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart that, by all rights, should have been mine.

November 27, 2024 at 5:12 AM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

John Warner

@biblioracle.bsky.social

I think we're probably underestimating the degree of change that will need to happen in education to deal with the presence of GenAI/LLMs. The studies I've read that show positive efficacy for LLM integration tend to measure that efficacy against what I call "schooling," rather than learning.

December 3, 2024 at 9:33 PM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

Willowsaurus 🦖

@waywardwillow.bsky.social

it is time

Tumblr post from user "vigilantsycamore"

Ebenezer Scrooge: Goes Outside
500 Muppets: There goes Mr. Asshole! There Goes Mr Bitch!

November 28, 2024 at 10:36 PM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

Dr. Nic, Namer of the Universe

@quakefultales.bsky.social

Let me show my hand as a narrative designer:

It's all narrative all the time whether you intend it to be or not. Mechanics are not just abstract tools, they mean and imply things too

November 14, 2024 at 9:08 PM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

Tim Onion

@bencollins.bsky.social

Hi everyone.

The Onion, with the help of the Sandy Hook families, has purchased InfoWars.

We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website.

We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off.

I can't wait to show you what we have cooked up.

The Onion Buys Alex Jones’s Infowars Out of Bankruptcy

The satirical news site planned to turn Infowars into a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” who peddle conspiracy theories and health supplements.

www.nytimes.com

November 14, 2024 at 2:09 PM

Reposted by Ben Roberts

Q. Pheevr

@handle.invalid

Books designed to be read only by human eyes are different from books designed to be read by machines, which is why Google will tell you that the phrase “shake my booty” can be found in an 1863 English translation of Don Quixote.