Dan Vera
LightNews LightNews
banner
danvera.com
Dan Vera
@danvera.com
1.2K followers 650 following 480 posts
Washington, DC —poet| poetry foundation bit.ly/40tituc , editor, literary historian, 📚: Speaking Wiri Wiri (Red Hen) & co-editor, Imaniman: Poets at the (Gloria) Anzaldúan Borderlands (Aunt Lute). Quilt & watercolor. danvera.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
danvera.com
search drinks in your camera roll. Random 4.
I recall #1 as a tasty cortado from Oak Cliff Coffee and #2 being a concoction we named “Scalia’s Tears“ after a good SCOTUS ruling (those were the days).
4 Photos of drinks including an espresso cortado and three fancy cocktails.
July 10, 2025 at 1:14 AM
danvera.com
We just had your weather down here in DC and let me say I'm glad you're not flying in this. It is SEVERE!
Hope you get home soon.
July 10, 2025 at 12:54 AM
danvera.com
Strawberry Rhubarb Pie #piesofbluesky #PIE
June 11, 2025 at 10:11 PM
danvera.com
Jewels of Strawberry High Season in Pennsylvania. Bought these 2 quarts from a kid *literally* just walking out of the 🍓 patch. #strawberry
A hand holding two quart containers filled with ripe juicy red strawberries above a background of green hostas.
June 7, 2025 at 2:13 PM
danvera.com
Came back from #AWP25 with a number of new books including Didi Jackson's "My Infinity." It was a real pleasure signing with her at the @redhenpress.bsky.social table, but today I've been enjoying her numinous poems. Even read a few aloud to the husband (always the mark of a good book IMO).
Book cover for Didi Jackson's My Infinity, with the Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint's painting, "The Dove No 3 Group IX" (1915).
April 2, 2025 at 11:51 PM
danvera.com
Happy National Poetry Month! Don't miss this great reading April 22nd celebrating the landmark Library of America “Latino Poetry” anthology. Honored to read with three other poets from the anthology incl. @alexlregalado.bsky.social @moralesjuanj.bsky.social @acevedowrite.bsky.social! #poetry
Poster for the national poetry month Latino poetry: places we call home, anthology from the library of america. Including photos of the four readers. Reading will include a panel discussion. Tuesday April 22nd at 7:00 p.m. at Martin Luther King Jr memorial Library in downtown Washington DC.
March 31, 2025 at 10:24 AM
danvera.com
Wisdom on the power of hospitality and the dismantling of the prejudiced world. #wisdom #sunbeam
Hospitality means we take people into the space that is our lives and our minds and our hearts and our work and our efforts. Hospitality is the way we come out of ourselves. It is the first step toward dismantling the barriers of the world. Hospitality is the way we turn a prejudiced world around, one heart at a time. Joan Chittister
March 7, 2025 at 7:33 PM
danvera.com
Richard Osman @richardosman1.bsky.social has a great point about Adrian Brody's bloated Oscar speech and the undervalued power of screenwriting in Hollywood.
March 5, 2025 at 5:15 PM
danvera.com
Trollope writing in 1883 on the "certain class of dishonesty" fits perfectly with our current period, its normalizing of dishonesty and corruption and the willingness of people to go along with it, to celebrate it, to empower it. Trump and Musk enact it, Bezos and Zuckerberg cosign and cover for it.
Nevertheless a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now. Anthony Trollope in 1883 on what led him to write The Way We Live Now
February 28, 2025 at 2:53 PM
danvera.com
Reading Charles Godfrey Leland's memoir (1898) when I come across his retelling of Horace Greeley's warning about wealth and the country.
I can only imagine they'd be staggered and horrified by Musk and the other techno Robberbarons.
Image of text from an old book, with the following highlighted: "Tell him not to get too rich — bad for the constitution and worse for the country. Any man who has more than a million is a public nuisance."
February 21, 2025 at 3:42 AM
danvera.com
"The best a poet can hope for..." Stanley Kunitz has it right here. And it's this kind of humility that made him so beloved a poet. #poetrysky #writingadvice #writingcommunity
“The best a poet can hope for is to be remembered for a while, to pass from one generation into another, to have some young person in another age open to a page and say, “How beautiful!” or “How true! He must have been like me.” Stanley Kunitz
February 14, 2025 at 5:15 PM
danvera.com
Words to write by.
"Confusing people does not make you an artist." Stephen Soderberg in white text against a black background.
February 12, 2025 at 5:27 PM
danvera.com
Wrote this poem about our first dog Roofus (Wagsright natch). @kimroberts-dc.bsky.social published it in Beltway Poetry (which she founded & edited). Was reminded of it tonight when neighbor/friend @susanscheid.bsky.social sent me this picture of her dog in the snow! #dogsofbluesky #poetry
February 12, 2025 at 1:08 AM
danvera.com
Used Bookstores are a kind of magic. For example, I was telling a friend about finding poetry books once owned by @cphillipspoet.bsky.social --one in @leftbankbooks.bsky.social in STL, the other in @halfpricebooks.bsky.social in Texas! A kind of strange used bookstore curation I really love! (1/3)
A well-lit, used bookstore, this one Dog Star books in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Photograph depicts a large room with high ceilings and rows of tall wooden bookshelves filled with books with different colored spines. Two people stand looking at books on the shelves. At right there's a floor to ceiling book-shelved wall with eleven rows of books and a very tall wooden bookshelf ladder,
February 11, 2025 at 10:47 PM
danvera.com
Snow's REALLY coming down now! Makes me really miss having a dog. This was 2016 and Blossom really loved it!
February 11, 2025 at 10:26 PM
danvera.com
Here in the states you can SIT on Pasternak's bench at VCCA, the artists and writers residency in Virginia.
Photo of a large cast-iron and wood-slatted bench in a park-like setting.
February 11, 2025 at 4:07 PM
danvera.com
As for the big Superbowl, here I stand.
Me exultant with both arms spread wide on a Vermont mountaintop with the caption, THIS IS ME NOT GIVING A SHIT ABOUT FOOTBALL!
February 9, 2025 at 11:38 PM
danvera.com
"Without community,
there is no liberation."
Audre Lorde
"Without community, there is no liberation." Audre Lorde
February 4, 2025 at 4:53 AM
danvera.com
"37 Beauties & the Clarity of the Blue Sky" A wonky log cabin meditation piece-work for my friend Sharon who had a hell of a week. I replaced the traditional center red (🔥) block with a patch of sky. Ringed it with scrap blocks representing some of the beauties of the world. #quiltsky #meditation
A square-shaped piece of quilting with small blocks of colored and patterned fabric, some with animal and botanical designs, surrounding a square panel with a white fluffy cloud in the sky at the center.
February 3, 2025 at 1:27 AM
danvera.com
This morning in my quote book, I came across Dorothy Thompson's warning. She was a courageous journalist who Hitler expelled from Germany for her writing on the frothing-at-the-mouth Nazi cult.
“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say ‘Heil’ to him, nor will they call him ‘Führer’ or ‘Duce.’ But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!’” Dorothy Thompson (1935)
January 31, 2025 at 2:59 PM
danvera.com
The Cuban poet and democratic freedom fighter José Martí, born on this date, with a word on
lighting the oven. He spent a lot of his life in exile, mostly in New York City. Note how he's not baking the bread here but lighting the oven so others might bake.
We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it. If I survive, I will spend my whole life at the oven door seeing that no one is denied bread and, so as to give a lesson of charity, especially for those who did not bring flour. José Martí
January 28, 2025 at 5:06 PM
danvera.com
Sontag on the "better standards of justice and of truthfulness" as a duty in writing. #writing
A great writer of fiction, by writing truthfully about the society in which she or he lives, cannot help but evoke (if only by their absence) the better standards of justice and of truthfulness that we have the right (some would say the duty) to militate for in the necessarily imperfect societies in which we live. Susan Sontag
January 27, 2025 at 2:11 AM
danvera.com
Some really thoughtful and valuable insight here from @billmckibben.bsky.social about understanding the historical moment we're living in and how we can organize and respond:
substack.com/home/post/p-...
"We need to figure out how to leverage those facts in the years ahead—creatively, in ways that make use of our advantage in truth and beauty and minimize our current lack of political power. That’ll be part two, and it may come with an assignment!" Bill McKibben
January 26, 2025 at 8:20 PM
danvera.com
Keep Fighting, Keep Dancing. #joy #crisis #dance #protest #fight #newscycle
From columnist Dan Savage: "The next four years are gonna suck. But they’ll suck worse if we let the news cycle — and the man who dominates it — drain the joy from our lives. We need to pay attention and we need to stay in the fight. Because of course we do. But we should spend as much time as we possibly can over the next four years with friends and lovers doing things that bring us joy. Anyone who tells you that making time for joy — however you define it — is a distraction or a betrayal has no idea what they’re talking about. During the darkest days of the AIDS Crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced at night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn’t look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing."
January 25, 2025 at 4:43 PM
danvera.com
DC's literary community is mourning another loss, first Myra Sklarew, now the bohemian force of nature Elisavietta “Lisa” Ritchie who was one of the early leading lights of @wwph.bsky.social Here's a poem of hers. For more about her see www.washingtonwriters.org/in-memoriam/
#poets #dcpoetry
Photograph of Elisavietta "Lisa" Ritchie set alongside her poem, "Advice To A Daughter". In the photo Ritchie is lying on the ground amidst fallen autumn leaves reading an open book. Her poem, "Advice To A Daughter," reads: Do not gnaw chicken bones before a lover, I tell her, as we crunch the cartilage of a hapless hen. Could put him off, give rise to thoughts you might have taste for more than skin. My lover is so meticulous he uses knife and fork, misses deep pleasures. I have to sneak to the kitchen, chew both our drumsticks clean before I scrape the plates. The best is what some call the parson’s nose, others term the pope’s, the rabbi’s. My mother said: What scuttles through the fence the last is surely the most succulent. So while our chicken stews apart you and I retrieve the bubbling bone gnaw, and juices trickling down our chins, weigh the risks of loss: either a fastidious lover or the choice parts of a bird.
January 25, 2025 at 3:46 PM