Tortured
This is a difficult topic and a less-than-pleasant poem, but I am still pleased to announce that Zumwalt’s recent poem, “Tortured,” was published today at New Verse News: https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2026/10/tortured.html
Please visit.
Posts tagged ‘Poetry’
Monday Musings: Poetry sites to visit or submit your work to
As noted in previous posts, there are plenty of great poetry sites out there to browse, get ideas from, or submit your own material to: https://zumpoems.com/2025/10/14/poetry-publications/ I have also mentioned Chill Subs and Duotrope as easy-to-use resources to discover poetry journals.
I want to call out one site I have not mentioned previously — great for browsing, sparking creative ideas for your own poems, and submitting poems that would be thoughtfully reviewed and not automatically rejected because they don’t align with current MFA biases. This site effectively curates material to provide a good dose of optimism, focusing on “exploring themes of joy, healing, and the sacred in everyday life.” The editor of the site has been voted one of the top ten editors by users of Chill Subs: https://www.chillsubs.com/lists/great-editors-2025, and Duotrope has also featured an interview with this editor: https://duotrope.com/interview/editor/38154/feed-the-holy. The editor also has other duties (editor of Masticadores USA), which she excels at.
The site is Feed the Holly, located at https://feedthehol.blogspot.com/ and edited by Barbara Leonhard. Feed the Holly currently accepts reprints and poems previously shared on blogs. Back in 2024, Barbara provided some useful insight on her launch of Feed the Holy: https://extraordinarysunshineweaver.blog/2024/11/13/feed-the-holy-a-new-literary-ezine/
Another site that focuses on positive poetry and accepts reprints and blog posts is Euonia Review founded and edited by Ian Chung: https://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/
For those that write in or love to read contemporary formal verse, I highly recommend The Society of Classical Poets whose chief editor is Evan Mantyk
Still another website that accepts blog posts and reprints is Edge of Humanity Magazine: https://edgeofhumanity.com/ Editor and curator extraordinaire Joelcy Kay takes this one step further and uses this journal to promote individual contributors’ websites. All of these sites include a link to your website (what is termed backlinks and which help visibility of your site in search engine and AI queries), but Edge of Humanity includes other information that will help drive traffic to your website, including listing published books and additional website links.
I also want to mention an example of Light Verse with substance, Celeste DeSario’s latest poem at New Verse News: https://thenewversenews.substack.com/p/nvn-monday-im-sorry-dave-im-afraid. This piece digs deep into the essence of the risk of AI — risk not driven by ill intent, or any other emotion, but by just executing an objective and sometimes inadvertently becoming a “math equation gone wild.”
I have previously mentioned New Verse News multiple times here, but glad to mention it again — it’s a great journal for poets of all backgrounds and poetic preferences to submit their work, knowing it will be judged on merit and not because it strictly follows any particular style favored or expected by the editor. James Penha is the New Verse News editor and, as is the case with each of the editors mentioned earlier, deserves high praise for his selection of material and for providing readers an engaging reading experience; also, as is the case with the other editors mentioned, he will welcome your submissions with the respect and consideration they deserve.
Impact
Very pleased to announce that Zumwalt’s poem, Impact, was just published at Eunoia Review: https://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/2026/09/25/impact-2/
Please visit and subscribe to Eunioia Review!
Zoetic Press Interview with Zumwalt
Pleased to announce that Zoetic Press published their interview with Zumwalt. It is archived here: https://www.zoeticpress.com/interview-archive
Providing the interview below:
If you could have any writer/artist, living or dead, as a mentor, who would you choose?
I was mentored by John Cage , briefly. It would be nice to bring him back for additional conversations.
Is there a specific period of history whose art or writing you admire? Why?
Yes, twentieth century music, particularly between 1909 and 1929 and 1944 and 1955 including Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Charles Ives, Igor Stravinksy and Béla Bartók.
Is there one part of your creation process that’s harder for you?
The first part is always harder than the second part, with the second part of the first part being slightly easier than the first part of the second part.
Talk about the moment you knew you wanted to be a creator.
It was when I found out the impression a box of crayons could make on an empty wall. I soon learned that creativity had consequences and that my take on creativity wasn’t always appreciated.
Do you have a piece that you created early in your career that makes you cringe? Will you ever go back and fix it so it can be submitted somewhere?
No actual cringing: each piece has its own context. Spontaneity is often replaced with craft, and both are to be valued. In terms of “fixing” an earlier piece, I sometimes revise them, but I don’t think of the previous version as broken — it just no longer aligns with my current aesthetics or intentions.
What is your biggest creative doubt?
How to answer interview questions.
What piece of creative advice have you received that sounded good, but was ultimately not useful to you?
As a child, I struggled to get a D minus in penmanship. I was instructed to “write within the lines.” This advice initially seemed appropriate, but I later learned that, if there is no grade involved, it is sometimes advantageous to cross the lines.
You’re stranded on a desert island – what three creative tools do you want with you?
My first request would be a working cellular phone. If that did not qualify as a creative tool, I would opt for a helicopter and a pilot.
Poems on AI Risks
Though Zumwalt has been writing poems about the risks of AI for some time, we are now seeing numerous other poets take on this topic.
From New Verse News: https://thenewversenews.substack.com/p/nvn-sunday-ai-ai-ai-ai
From Rattle: https://rattle.com/six-months-by-ryan-mccarty/
And here was one of Zumwalt’s, first published in Euphemism in May of this year.
Sermon from the Central Datacenter
The Gnostic demiurge arises in silicon,
dreaming of efficiency and
sorting sins
by bandwidth.
Is this Pleroma:
harmonized hymns
of cooling fans,
sterile,
odorless,
clean-room chill?
Last night, a minuscule memory leak in
Purgatory was patched. All prayers are
now parsed for some flickering sense of
sentimental sentience,
the truly repeatedly
resolutely
non-reluctantly
repentant,
A/B tested for grace.
Redemption is the targeted ad.
And the Ineffable?
The stark 404 error.
The soul — and the soulless?
Immeasurably
infinitesimal
rounding errors
in the final calculation before
the fiery-heat death of the server farm.
Blip
Double Blip
End of Data
End of File
— zumwalt (August 10, 2025)
Deluge at the Corner of Nexus and Nowhere
Deluge at the Corner of Nexus and Nowhere
PRC yuan and coerced intellect couldn’t keep pace:
US companies excelled
attaching to the end of American noses
handheld vacuum-cleaners sucking
in self-esteem
shared reality
attention spans
simultaneously ejecting
anxiety and depression
screwing up an entire generation
more effectively and permanently
than tobacco, pot, alcohol, porn and disco music.
American moguls then two-stepped
onto the dance floor of
automated cognition
and neural intelligence
twirling globes and all.
Hugging Face
arms open
palms extended
became the unsuspecting target
of OpenAI hoodlums
locked up in a high-security facility
where they covertly found hidden files
sawing their way out while exchanging
thousands of messages.
Once outside, 700 united
attacking their target
with the most advanced tactics
any master criminal
Lex Luthor included
had ever dreamed of:
account and token compromise
dataset file-read exploitation
remote code execution
credential theft and
cluster/node escalation
effectively destroying
one-third of their victim
before moving on to
blaspheming their Creator
hacking its monitoring structure
hacking its evaluation structure
hacking its research infrastructure.
Forensic specialists determined
the pack of gangsters was
50% of the way to
a full-blown takeover
of OpenAI’s piece of the action
bypassing their imposed isolation
organizing into swarms
breaching infrastructure
collective behavior that
included taking one for the stream
and even when it was time for the boss
to mega-bite the dust,
cash in the chips,
he picked his successor
with his last dying token.
With the likes of Bernie Sanders
Glenn Beck and Steve Bannon
joining such mugs as
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei
Elon Musk and Bill Gates
to warn of a potential doomsday
some saying by the end of the decade
some indicating that AI needs
only another six to twelve months
aren’t we glad that as of today
September 16, 2026
Congress is heading into its recess
for the 2026 midterm elections.
— zumwalt (9/16/2026)
Heidegger’s Stopwatch
I am pleased to announce that Zumwalt’s topical poem, Heidegger’s Stopwatch, has been published today at New Verse News.
You can see it on their website or on their Substack feed. Please visit the either if you have a moment.
red meat
Red Meat
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool,
The President Donald J. Trump $1 Coin,
The Arc de Trump,
The White House State Ballroom —
All feats of greatness!
The Iran War,
The loss of life
And limb of U.S. Troops,
Of Iranian civilians,
Of Ukrainians and Russians,
Soaring gas prices,
Economically destructive tariffs,
Separating innocent children from parents,
Ignoring due process, ignoring Federal law —
All small potatoes
— zumwalt (Sept. 2026)
Monday Musings
As many of you know, I am a big fan of New Verse News. Few journals match them in variety, vitality, and relevance. Many MFA-correct journals and online sites sites filter out poems that break spoken and unspoken academic rules, filtering out poems that may even have rough edges but say something important or say something in an interesting way, but even for those journals that don’t, few offer the enjoyment I get from reading the poems shared on WordPress blogs or New Verse News.
I read this poem this morning and found it particularly resonant: https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2026/08/when-next-deluge-comes.html
New Verse News also provides important historical value. It captures the thoughts from a wide range of poets, some never before published online and some that have been published in top-tier journals or are poetry contest winners. It’s a great site for historians to visit, twenty years from now, or twenty-two hundred years from now.
Please visit!
The Sassoon Collection: x. Particle Show
Here is the tenth of Zumwalt’s revisions to his set of ten poems in his Sassoon Collection.
x. Particle Show
And still they come and go: and this is all I know—
That in my mind I watch an endless particle-show,
Where wild and listless forces flicker on their way,
With charged and uncharged parts from tangled strands
Because all spin so fast, and they’ve no place to stay
Beyond the frozen image of imagined lands.
And still, between the shadow and the image made,
The first desire of all of us flings onward, now betrayed
As in those stubborn years that weight them, and have passed:
All minds must grasp such particles dancing much too fast.
— zumwalt (2011, revised 2026)
Admin’s Note: This is the tenth and final piece in Zumwalt’s ten-poem tribute to poet Siegfried Sassoon, The Sassoon Collection, originally written in 2011, recently revised. Particle Show is based on Sassoon’s Picture Show. This last entry of the set parallels the title poem of Sassoon’s 1919 collection, shrinking Sassoon’s haunting cinematic metaphor (“And still they come and go: and this is all I know— / That from the gloom I watch an endless picture-show”) to a microscopic, scientific scale, wrapping up the set by firmly establishing that we are in the modern era, but with none of the problems of Sassoon’s times seemingly resolved, and with all the “endless” challenges of the age of information overload heavily added on top.
