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Category: General (Page 2 of 135)

How to get copies of Something Wonderful and Something Necessary

There are several ways to purchase Something Wonderful AND NOW Something Necessary.
from me at these events and/or signings
DM me with your address etc on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn and Venmo me $15 at @SMALLJONES,
or from for Something Wonderful or for Something Necessary at Redhawk Publications
or pick up a copy or order from your local bookstore including these North Carolina stores:

Last choice – Something Wonderful and Something Necessary are also on Amazon.

New! Thanks to Redhawk Publications, you can now order Something Wonderful in hardcover for only $20 from these sites:

Something Necessary
Something Wonderful

On Mastodon as @smalljones on @triangletoot.party

Poems to be read for Nexus Poets – September 1, 2020

At 7 pm EDT on September 1, 2020, I will be the featured poet reading with the Nexus Poets (largely in New Bern, NC). An open mic follows so follow me over on Zoom and bring a contribution of your own.

I will be reading these poems which have been released online in the past few months:

Ode to a Certain Feeling of Optimism from Red Fez
At Seventy from Red Fez
Beach at Corolla, NC from South Writ Large
My Roommate Jeoffry from Light Poetry Magazine
Cicadas from Grand Little Things
Slugs from Vox Poetica
Pigs Eyes from Unbroken
The Trouble with Macaques from Triggerfish Critical Review
Skinnydip in the Millpond from Speckled Trout Review
In Praise of Small Disturbances from 2River 25th Anniversary
Moving from House to House from Broadkill Review (nominated for Best of the Net)

Poetry Publications – May 2020 – 2022 (see Page for most recent)

Accepted for future publication:

Hudson Review.
Geode. 2022.

Triggerfish Critical Review.
smoke fire. July, 2022.

North Carolina Literary Review
At the Watermen’s Dock. Summer, 2022. Honorable Mention. James Applewhite Prize.

Indelible (Feminine Issue).
Betty’s Current Status. February 2022. (First seen in Broadkill Review)
A Place Less Foreign. February 2022.
The Queen’s First Door. February 2022.

8 Poems.
Verse in Which I Should Probably Be More Charitable Towards the Gift of a Book of Mediocre Verse. TBA. 2022.

2020 Ekphrastic Poetry Book from Craven Arts Council and Gallery.
After A Sudden Blow. Print only sometime in 2022.

Available for Reading Now:

Grand Little Things.
All new writing is about grief. February 1, 2022.

O.Henry Magazine.
Pinestraw Magazine.
Against Desirelessness. In O.Henry. January 2022.
Against Desirelessness. In PineStraw. January 2022.
(First publication in Snapdragon: a Journal of Arts and Healing, November 2019).

Silver Birch Press. How To Heal the Earth series
At the Big Sweep. January 16, 2022.

Wine Cellar Press.
Operating System. January 15, 2022.

Red Fez.
Guarding Watermelons. January 13, 2022.
At the Butchers’ Souk. January 13, 2022.

Sheila-Na-Gig.
Death Came For The Cardinal. Winter 2021.

As It Ought To Be Magazine
Magnificent Frigatebirds. November 19, 2021.

The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.
25th Anniversary Issue.
Of A Marriage. November, 2021.

Wine Cellar Press.
Triolet of Zoom Impatience October 15, 2021.

Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath
Joseph Bathanti & David Potorti, editors.
Press 53, publisher.
It Strikes a Contemporary. September 2021.

January Review
My Life as a Scorpion. August, 2021.
My Precious Death. August, 2021.

101 Words.
Tender Tentacle. August 7, 2021.

Wine Cellar Press.
Hot Now! An Ode to Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. July, 2021.

O.Henry Magazine.
Pinestraw Magazine.
Walter Magazine.
On An Okra Flower. July, 2021.
—in O.Henry
—in PineStraw
—in Walter.
(First found in Red Fez).

Bare Back Magazine.
Encircling. July 2021. (NSFW)

The Lake
Spiders in the Bathtub. July 2021.

Prime Number Magazine, Issue 197.
Ireland as Seen From a Porch Swing in Hickory, NC. July 1, 2021

Cider Press Review.
Cardinal. Summer 2021.

Indelible (Food and Nurture Issue).
Bread. June 25, 2021.
To a Tuber. June 25, 2021.
Artichokes. June 25, 2021.

Adirondack Review
Traces of a Portrait of Che Guevara on a Wall in Oaxaca. Summer 2021.

Live Nude Poems.
Mellow Gorillas. May 24, 2021.

Grand Little Things
Homage to George Herbert, Invitation of a Damselfly in March, Same Jay Seen Twice. May 20, 2021.

Red Fez.
Red Clay Way. May, 2021.
How Firm a Foundation. May, 2021.

Speckled Trout Review.
Swifts. May, 2021.

Asses of Parnassus
Sndbrg April 20, 2021 and Frst April 28, 2021. (two short poems made shorter as haiku).

Silver Birch Press. Still Waiting Series.
Still Waters. April 20, 2021.

Anti Heroin Chic.
This Old Dog. April 2, 2021.

Spoonfeed.
The Executioner s Love Potion. March 28, 2021.

Ekphrastic Review.
After A Sudden Blow. March 11, 2021.

Silver Birch Press. How To Series.
How I Avoid Assassination and You Can Too. March 10, 2021.

101 Words.
I Do This and That. March 9, 2021.

The South Shore Review.
When The Shadow Took the Day Off. March 7, 2021.

O.Henry Magazine.
Pinestraw Magazine.
Pairing Mantids. March, 2021. (First appeared in Panoply)

The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.
The Disappointment of the Comet Kohoutek. March, 2021.

Literary Yard.
”Emancipation of the Mermaid Tattoo,” “Larger Concerns,” “An Aran Sweater,” “Radio, Bosnia,” and “Against Bird Poems.” February 27, 2021.

Grand Little Things
Two Triolets. “The Saint of the Trees” and “Erasure.” February 5, 2021.

Verse Virtual.
Wine, Age. February, 2021.

Red Fez.
The Impossibility of America. January 14, 2021.
Poem in Which I Forget Myself. January 14, 2021.

Panoply, A Literary Zine.
Pairing Mantids. January 2, 2021.

American Journal of Poetry.
I Too Dislike Them. January, 2021.

Broadkill Review.
Betty s Current Status. January 1, 2021.

As It Ought To Be Magazine
Something Wonderful. December 23, 2020.

The Rusty Truck
Visions of Andrew December 11, 2020.

Thoughts on the Power of Goodness, co-edited by Timothy F. Crowley and Jaki Shelton Green.
Rising with the Moon on Advent Eve. December, 2020.
Print only. Order here

Deuce Coupe Poetry
The Good Butcher and Lunar Exploration December 9, 2020.

Redheaded Stepchild.
Firing Pottery on the Night Before Winter Solstice. Fall 2020.

little death lit.
All the Way Up. Issue 5. Fall 2020.

The Phare.
Can Crows Kiss? November/December 2020.

Grand Little Things
Eastbourne in May. October 28, 2020.

Madness Muse Press
Who Would Not Celebrate the Changes. October 11, 2020.
In one hand, mine. October 11, 2020.

Prime 53 Poem Challenge
One Red Maple. October 1, 2020.

River Heron Review.
Return to Kurdistan. Special Issue. Poems, For Now. September 15, 2020.

Ekphrastic Review.
Unnamed Early 20th Century Burial in St Matthews Episcopal Church Cemetery, Hillsborough, NC (2020). September 8, 2020.

2River View.
25th Anniversary Issue.
In Praise of Small Disturbances. September 1, 2020.
In an Unripe Season September 1, 2020.

Frank Gallery
Essay on Ekphrastic Poetry. August 17, 2020.

Red Fez.
To a Certain Feeling of Optimism. August, 2020.
To Very Small Devices. August, 2020.

Ekphrastic Review.
Lewis Morley’s photograph of Christine Keeler sitting the wrong way round on a copy of an Arne Jacobsen chair (UK) 1963. July 22, 2020.

Grand Little Things
Cicadas. July 21, 2020
Prayer to a Deer in Summer. July 21, 2020

Unbroken Journal.
The Church of Misdirected Saints. July 2020.
Pig’s Eye. July 2020.

Redheaded Stepchild Magazine.
Pulled Up My Socks. Spring 2020.

Vox Poetica Magazine.
Slugs. Spring 2020.

South Writ Large.
Bee Fall. Spring 2020.
Beach at Corolla, NC. Spring 2020.

Third Wednesday Magazine.
The Happiness of Fear. Summer 2020.
An Honest Talk To The Shadow. summer 2020.

Triggerfish Critical Review.
Visiting Lhakdor. July 2020.
The Trouble With Macaques. July 2020.
The Hidden Buddhists of Baikal. July 2020.

Turtle Island Quarterly
Early Fall Full Moon. January 2020.

Broadkill Review
Seventy Three. March/April 2020.
Moving From House to House. March/April 2020

Poetry in May (so far)

This week saw three of my poems published:

  • Slugs in Vox Poetica

    They are so unlovely and unloved

  • Beach at Corolla, NC and Bee Fall in South Writ Large

    Inside the beached whale was a library

    Can goodbyes last past parting
    or are they, like bees visits
    to clover, intense moments
    of working passion, nectar
    searching, the sweet flight begun
    soon after? Home to the hive.

Also I will be going to the Sewanee Writers Conference. Not this year but in 2021 as this year the conference has been COVIDed into Master Classes.
I have not been to such a conference since being at Warren Wilson in the very early 1990 and before that at Breadloaf in the very early 1980s.

Looking forward.

The Great Pestilence of 1855 in Virginia

In June 1855, a ship, the Benjamin Franklin, coming from the West Indes was placed under quarantine in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The captain broke quarantine. 3000 people–1/3 of the population of Norfolk and Portsmouth, Va.–died of yellow fever.

The first doctor treating patients to die was Dr Richard Silvester (he thought he might have immunity from previous exposure) in August. In September, his wife Lydia, his son Richard also a Doctor, and a younger son, William, were struck by the fever and died. Before winter, a daughter, Margaret, also died of the fever.

The elder Dr Silvester was my great-great-great-grandfather. The story of how the family was nearly wiped out by the captain breaking quarantine has been in my family since.

Yellow Fever was localized, carried by mosquitoes (that was not understood at the time. Vapors and the like were blamed), but ravaging. Today’s pandemic is at global scale, but the swiftness of the spread, the quarantine, and costs of particular lives echoes the so-called Great Pestilence in Virginia.

(note to myself: add links to this later)

Open tabs, new words

Yesterday, my friend Eric (the Silent K) asked folks on Facebook:

Hey, word-smiths. Is there a word that describes the sensation of doing something normal in abnormal times?

In response, I coined not one but two related words – Abnotopia the sensation of doing something normal in abnormal times and Abnophoria Feeling elation in an abnormally weird or scary time. They’re now in Urban Dictionary. Vote ’em up!

Incidentally some open tabs in my browser:

  1. The Myth of Voice by Sean Igoe in The Lark
  2. “All You Have To Do Is Say The Words” Some notes regarding Robert Hass’s “Summer Snow” by Jonathan Farmer in Believer Magazine’s Logger
  3. Windows, Emily Leithouser’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fenêtres in LIterady Matters
  4. Narasimbha – the 4th avatar of Vishnu. The half-man/half-lion avatar is a one time use god. He incarnated, he killed a very bad deamon, and that’s it.

Prosing in Poetry

After being heavily tied to verse, I’ve taken a vacation into prose poems. This despite Robert Pinsky’s warning in his appreciation of Robert Hass’ A Story About the Body:

“A standard form for young poets these days, as the sonnet might have been for another generation, is the prose poem. It seems that most first books must contain one or two prose poems, if only to demonstrate the poet’s ability to manage the form, or awareness of fashion.”

In part this is also driven by my reading through “A Cast Iron Airplane That Can Actually Fly,” an anthology with commentary that includes Robert Hill Long and Charles Fort, which includes a wide variety of prose poems.

I did one prose poem a while back for Triggerfish Critical Review, but now have 3 or 4 more.

Anyone else working in this genre? Have favorite ones? Say Hass’ Paschal Lamb or Carolyn Forche’s The Colonel?

Update: Since posting this I’ve had three new prose poems accepted by Triggerfish Critical Review for their 24th issue due out online in July 2020.

Poems literally on the Moon

A manuscript of my poems was sent to the moon’s surface April 11, 2019 as part of Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library delivered by SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander.

Just my manuscript?

First, let me be a bit more modest. We, Arch Mission, created a library designed to be landed on the moon via SpaceIL. The library contains over 30 million pages of text and images etched into 40 micron thick nickel foils. My manuscript is only about 60 pages of all of that.

All of Project Gutenberg, all of the English language Wikipedia, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (in all of the recognized languages), the PanLex datasets (from the Long Now Foundation, a linguistic key to 5000 languages, with 1.5 billion translations between them), and some “private collections” (the entire works of Peter Drucker, the poetry of Kathleen Spivak, and more) make up a few of the other pages in the library. Some contents are yet to be revealed for various reasons but see The Lunar Library Overview for details on content and on the physical construction of the disks and etching process.

How am I involved with Arch Mission?

I’m on the Advisory Board for the Arch Mission Foundation helping the founder Nova Spivak identify free and open content to represent our human endeavors in the library. I also give advice as to categories of material to include. I was delighted that Nova asked me for a manuscript that might become lunar.

Where is the Lunar Library?

That’s a good question. The Beresheet lander landed really hard. That is to say it crashed on the lunar surface somewhere near or in the Sea of Serenity. The Library could have been ejected or sailed off at impact or… well, we’re not sure. Nova and other team member have created a document that speculates on the fate of the library.

So it’s on the moon. Even likely in one piece. But it’s small and waiting to be discovered.

And there are tardigrades!

At least we think so. Nova (I wasn’t part of this bit) had the library coated with protected resin in which there are, as far as I know, water bears aka tardigrades, embedded. Tardigardes are the roughest creatures on earth and can survive in a state of limbo for a long time under adverse conditions. While their inclusion concerned some people, the very idea that some form of earth life might be part of the library effort is novel.

2017 – 2020 Poetry Publications

Turtle Island Quarterly
Early Fall Full Moon. Issue 18. March 2020.

Broadkill Review
Seventythree. March/April 2020.
Moving From House to House. March/April 2020

Red Fez
At Seventy. Issue 131. January 2020.

Blake-Jones Review
Messengers. December 2019.

Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing
Scavangers. December 2019. Redemption and Grace Issue 5.4.
(digital subscription required)

Speckled Trout Review
Skinnydip in the Mill Pond. Fall 2019.

Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing
Against Desirelessness. November 2019. Broken/Whole Issue 5.3.
(digital subscription required)

Kakalak.
The Red Vinegar Sauce. December 2019.
(print only)

Hermit Feathers Review.
Lost Harbor. 2019.
Blue Ridge. 2019.
(print only)

Light: A Journal of Light Verse Since 1992.
My Roommate Joeffry. Winter/Spring 2019.

Red Fez
On an Okra Flower. Issue 117. October 2018. Best of the Net Prize nomination

Trigger Fish Critical Review.
State Mayakovsky Museum. Issue 19. 2018.

PinesongNorth Carolina Poetry Society.
2018 Award Winners:
Start the Game. Joanna Catherine Scott Award – First Place. Pushcart Prize nomination.
Hymn to Cash. Katherine Kennedy McIntyre Light Verse Award – Second Place.
Where I Come From. Mary Ruffin Poole American Heritage Award – First Place.
(print only)

International Lawrence Durrell Society.
She Sails. White Mice Poetry Contest 2017.

North Carolina Literary Review
Basketball is a Kind of Poetry. 2017 (online only) Best of the Net Prize nomination. Honorable Mention in James Applewhite Poetry Contest.
Clear Channel. 2017. (print only). Pushcart Prize nomination. 2nd Place in James Applewhite Poetry Contest.

Enough of #noemail and on to verse

I pretty much quit blogging about not doing email and about the various alternatives in 2016. No, I didn’t decide to pick email back up. I was not only tired of email, but tired of arguing about it. The crushing failure of email to adopt to 21st Century mobile first communications is either 1) obvious or 2) you are too entrenched to ever be convinced by the facts and trends.

Consider the case, like my Inbox, closed. That is closed except for a few dire or important circumstances.

I started this blog in 2004 as Facebook was beginning, 2 years before Twitter started, and 6 years before Instagram was founded. In the beginning, blogs did a lot of what those services do now, but–as you know–link sharing, photo sharing, event sharing, and many other functions have moved to services that do a better job. Blogs are back to being a place personal essays and personal websites. Not a bad place to be, really.

I’ll do a bit more blogging here about poetry publications and the like instead starting now.

Open source app takes on Ebola and mental health in Liberia

Starting in September, I’ve been doing consulting with IntraHealth International‘s Informatics group. I’ve been impressed by the ways that this small group of dedicated people have developed Open Source software infrastructure for increasing the capacity of frontline health workers to do their jobs under tough circumstances. No circumstances — Palestine and Afghanistan perhaps excepted but for different reasons — are tougher than in Liberia during and in the continuing aftermath of the Ebola epidemic.

IntraHealth folks collaborated broadly and quickly to develop a new open source project mHero to create a bidirectional linkage between frontline health workers and ministries of health to help get out information about Ebola and to get information back to the ministry.

Largely because of IntraHealth’s strategy of developing increased capacity in both ministries and workers, and because the software and culture takes advantage of open source principles for remix and resuse, the ministry workers in Liberia found ways that mHero could be used in the diverse areas of mental health and in Information, Communications and Technology evaluation.

I just wrote about this work in detail for Open Source dot Com in an article Open source app takes on Ebola and mental health in Liberia. Check it out.

Open Source Global Healthwinksplay

The Web Going Dark – Preserving and Serving Aging Websites

Adrienne LaFrance writes in the Atlantic in an article called “Raiders of the Lost Web” about vanishing websites and the recovery of one particularly important investigative reporting piece, “The Crossing.” Along the way, LaFrance discusses the state of web archiving through brief interviews with Jason Scott and Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive as well as Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation. The problems of preserving everything are still insurmountable. The problems of just preserving and serving valuable websites, those curated say or deemed to be of ongoing importance, is possible but not yet done well.

I’m glad to see the continued attention to this problem. With the help of support from IBM research grant entitled “Keeping the Historic Web Alive and Accessible: preserving and serving,” I’m involved in using virtualization to keep older versions of older software open and accessible.

In fact, I’ve kept open and accessible a version of Tim Berners-Lee’s earliest public webpage from 1991. You can read about the context of the page in an Atlantic article from 2013.

Despite the great efforts of Internet Archive and others, archivists attempts at preserving websites have largely been a collection of web page collected periodically by such successful software as Archive.org’s Heritrix. While page collectors provide a good service especially for sites that do not allow access to the database that drive them, they fail on several fronts.

First, a complex site can never be completely captured by a screen capture program or even a video. The number of potential pages and interactions cannot be duplicated in such a manner.

Second, user interactions with a complex site cannot be duplicated by a captured set of static pages. Understanding interactions is important to the use of archival material.

Third, the context of use and interactions is lost when the user experience is changed from one of interactivity and customization to one of simply retrieving selected static pages.

Even worse are archival activities that attempt to preserve by atomizing the objects from the pages removing images, audio, texts, etc and placing them in new decontextualized object databases completely unrelated to their original context.

We propose, using ibiblio as an example, to attack this preservation problem by using machine virtualization and virtual machine management tools. One suite of tools that particularly interest us are NCSU’s Virtual Computing Lab known as VCL. VCL is in use at over 200 institutions and has a strong support structure. Open source and licensed under the Apache project licenses, VCL is mostly used to provide temporary virtual machine for training computer scientists. We and our partners at NC State see a new use for VCL as a way to manage and present older servers Running older software in a secure yet living and interactive way.

I hope that we and those others of us working on digital preservation and in virtualization can provide a framework that benefits the creators, the archivist, and publics present and future.

Look for some initial results to be posted here soon.

#switchpoint ideas: Digital Development Principles

On Thursday April 22, I’ll be leading a MicroLab session on Digital Development Principles with Merrick Schaefer, the Lead of the Mobile Data team at USAID, and INTRAHealth’s own Dykki Settle as part of the SwitchPoint conference in my favorite NC community, Saxapahaw.

Do concepts like designing with the user, understanding ecosystems, and using all things open (source, standards, data, innovation) around the world excite you? They excite the international development community too! Join us for a discussion about the Digital Development Principles (www.ict4dprinciples.org) – the product of a global groundswell to capture lessons learned and guide future donor investments in information and communication technology for development (ICT4D). Together we will explore how the Principles help create new opportunities and synergies, driving us beyond simple technology solutions to true transformative change.

A photo posted by switchpoint (@switchpoint) on

#noemail at the End of 2014

As usual, XKCD nails it with a set of panels on email and #noemail and phone and fax. It makes so much sense — Snapchat or Fax instead of email or voicemail.

What is email?

But a new report from Pew Research on the perceived importance of work communication says people at work value email over even “the internet.” I have nits to pick here. the biggest one being that email is part of the internet. I think the survey meant to ask the Web, but just as the same Pew folks did a quiz about how well you “know the Web” which asked several questions that were about the internet as a whole and about apps that are not Web apps — this drives me bananas.

A lot of people are concerned about productivity and the negative impact of email on the office. Over the past week or so:

Perry Timms of i-Practice was interviewed about #noemail by Claire Burge at her blog. Irony alert: To find out more about i-Practice, just click on the mailto: link and you will send email to Perry.

Andy Swann of The Work Project writes about The Last Days of Email in Medium. Subtitled “Re-humanising the way I communicate” (yes he is British and so we get “s” for “z” occasionally), Andy encourages more human contact (without saying as I’ve said here that we are engaged in a robot war against evil robots (spam), well-meaning robots (sending notifications and the like), humans that act like robots (ReplyAll, acknowledging to an entire list, etc) and the robotic architecture of email itself). Call him or follow him on Twitter. Both are more human. I agree.

Founder and CEO of Pyrus, the workplace collaboration and productivity platform, Max Nalsky writes in The Next Web that “How quitting email helped my company communicate better”. Rather than tell how he did it with examples, Nalsky provides a better service; he suggests several solutions for various size companies and includes a section advice for “brave CEOs.” Among the suggested tools are Slack, HipChat, TigerText and building your own solutions.

Another person collecting #noemail stories for productivity is the aforementioned Claire Burge who interviewed Perry Timms. It all started with a moment of madness. I had simply had enough of email. It ruled my workday and I didn’t want it to dictate my life anymore. And so I decided to quit… Burge writes on her page dedicated to “Living a Life Without Email,” which is the tag line long used by Luis Suarez. Burge includes a link to a video interview with Suarez. She also offers workshops on reducing dependence of email within your workplace.

All of the above, and I, are offering more social solutions for increased productivity and a better life. But venture capitalist, Fred Wilson insists “Social is over” and it is increasingly being replaced by Messaging and Mobile.

“What Just Happened?” Wilson asks. And having seen this trend myself, I too wonder what’s in store for the new year.

Imagining the Future of Privacy and Security

Pew Research Internet Project
The latest Imagining the Internet report is out from The PewResearch Internet Project and Elon University. This one focuses on the future of Privacy and Security.

In it, I say:

During the previous century of urbanization, we constantly complained of alienation and isolation. No one knew anyone quite as well as we did when we were in small towns. Now, like it or not, we are having to relearn the social behavior of small towns: how to cooperate, tolerate, or just ignore differences. Frankly, we were not so great at all of that when we were in small towns. Now, we get another chance to try to live like a Family of Mankind.

But read the report for more and varied insights.

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