Chiara Di Lello
LightNews LightNews
banner
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Chiara Di Lello
@chiaradilello.bsky.social
1.9K followers 500 following 890 posts
For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. (Woolf)
Posts Replies Media Videos
chiaradilello.bsky.social
For this week I was browsing gratitude-related poems bc of the upcoming holiday, then realized I could just do "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden. (Though thanks to @poetsorg.bsky.social I also found this lovely and unsettling Bruce Weigl poem along the way. I think we're gonna read both.)
Those Winter Sundays By Robert Hayden Toggle annotations Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? Home Bruce Weigl I didn't know I was grateful for such late-autumn bent-up cornfields yellow in the after-harvest sun before the cold plow turns it all over into never. I didn't know I would enter this music that translates the world back into dirt fields that have always called to me as if I were a thing come from the dirt, like a tuber, or like a needful boy. End lonely days, I believe. End the exiled and unraveling strangeness.
November 17, 2025 at 6:54 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
I love teaching afterschool poetry bc I can do whatever the heck I want and often that just means sharing some of my all time faves with this sweet and wacky bunch of 3rd to 5th graders. Day one I started them with "Recuerdo" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, just to enjoy the rhythm and story.
Recuerdo By Edna St. Vincent Millay We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable— But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table, We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon; And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon. We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry; And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear, From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere; And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold. We were very tired, we were very merry, We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head, And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read; And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears, And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
November 17, 2025 at 6:48 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Humans! Pre-orders are open for my chapbook, CHILDLESS MILLENNIAL. Read more about it and grab your copy here:
www.gameoverbooks.com/store/p/chil...
@gameoverbooks.bsky.social
Promo graphic: An ultrasound showing a yellow book, CHILDLESS MILLENNIAL, by Chiara Di Lello from Game Over Books. Expected Jan 2026 Childless Millennial is a rallying cry for a label reclaimed with pride. This book is a blueprint-by-amalgamation for what a fulfilling non-reproducing life can be. Drawing inspiration from as disparate sources as her own non-biological mother figures, the act of nurturing of other people's children, and the natural world, Chiara Di Lello's chapbook cuts against the expectation of compulsory motherhood. Through a multi-generational dive into her own Ukrainian immigrant family, she wrestles with the choice to be child-free and its thorny entanglements with gender and culture. Childless Millennial rejects expectations and forges its own answers to what makes a meaningful life.
November 16, 2025 at 9:59 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Look what my Mama got me for my birthday! Eeee!
Hardcover copy of Philip Pullman's The Rose Field, third volume of his latest trilogy set in the same world as the Golden Compass (with Gus the dog for scale)
November 11, 2025 at 4:18 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
I picked this book back up last week and just got through the chapter about community clinics during the Crisis / austerity measures in Greece ca. 2008.

Thinking about the systems we need to be building *now* to take care of each other and meet our own needs. Begin somewhere, just begin.
Cover of Adam Greenfield's book Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire
November 10, 2025 at 1:27 AM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
📢 ANNOUNCEMENT TIME:
We're less than three months away from pub day for my debut chapbook, CHILDLESS MILLENNIAL.

Tell your friends, your English teacher, and of course all your favorite non-biological aunties.

📚 Pre-order details coming soooon

Brought to you by @gameoverbooks.bsky.social 🕹
Ultrasound showing a book titled CHILDLESS MILLENNIAL. Below the image, Chiara Di Lello Game Over Books. In the top corner, Expected Jan 2026
November 9, 2025 at 8:47 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Today's my birthday so I climbed the local mountain with my dog. I'm grateful for the past year in so many ways. Grateful to have reached this age. Grateful to be able to get up today & decide yeah, okay, let's go climb a mountain. 🧡🍂🍁
Chiara in sunglasses with orange brown leaves behind and light glinting off the Hudson River Chiara and Gus the dog, who has white fur and pointy ears. Hudson River just visible in the background.
November 7, 2025 at 8:49 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Good morning! Tomorrow is my birthday, and in the runup I have been doing a "fuck ICE, free Palestine" bday fundraiser. 3 weeks in, we are close to $2,500! I'm inviting folks on here to chip in if you can -- the cost of a nice coffee or your last takeout order. (Info on recipients in next post)
A rainbow over the Hudson River, and instructions on how to contribute to the fundraiser. Give via venmo, handle at ChiaraDiLello Selfie of Chiara in front of trees and water. She's wearing gold glasses and an ivory sweater with her hair down
November 6, 2025 at 1:01 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Poets! Show me your favorite poetry book *cover* and tell me why it's great for that collection of poems.

My example: Emilia Phillip's EMBOUCHURE. This collage perfectly matches the book's cheeky, queer, joyful takedown of toxic masculinity.
Cover of EMBOUCHURE by Emilia Phillips. Cover art is a collage probably from mid 20thc sources, showing a person with feminine hair and features (kind of like Nancy Drew) wearing a double breasted suit, smiling up at a strange oversized leafy plant that is decidedly phallic.
October 27, 2025 at 1:02 AM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
I have a... not small amount of woodcarving to do for tomorrow's local printmaking festival. Rec me some full albums to listen to while I work?

Been listening to many The Police albums, & today it's Janelle Monae. So...eclectic. Introduce me to something new!
Partially carved woodblock 3ft square with tools resting on it
October 17, 2025 at 4:17 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Every genAI booster in 2025:
Elephant and Piggie book cover titled "I *really* like Slop!"
October 7, 2025 at 4:05 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
After school poetry class for 4th and 5th graders starts today. Hoping this lends some light amid all the terrible.

At the last second I pulled down the book of poems by my first ever 4th grade class and omg if my heart isn't melting.
Printouts of poems by Lucille Clifton, Edna St Vincent Millay, and William Carlos Williams, plus a volume of poems written by chiaras former students
October 6, 2025 at 6:48 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
--> (see quote.) If art has helped me feel more alive, then let my responsibility be to help others feel more alive (through art or any other means), & to turn this aliveness I'm grateful to access towards our collective thriving. (fin)

(also ty @guante.info for inspiring a little Sunday musing 🙏🏻)
I tell my students, "when you get these jobs that you have been brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game." - Toni Morrison
October 5, 2025 at 4:34 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
--> I supposed I'm mostly paraphrasing Howard Thurman (had to go look up the quote as it floated around my brain), just adding on the idea that ONCE people come alive, it's our responsibility to turn our aliveness toward some part(s) of the struggle for justice... & now I'm thinking of Morrison. -->
Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive." - Howard Thurman
October 5, 2025 at 4:26 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
There is so much to say about this essay but if you only read one part, read THESE MFing STATISTICS and marvel that any of us ever measured ourselves against this absolute circlejerk farce.
Here are some numbers to help answer these questions. About 2,850 poems have been published in the 38 volumes of The Best American Poetry. Twenty percent of those poems were sourced from five publications: The New Yorker (169 poems), Poetry (129), American Poetry Review (110), Paris Review (78), and Ploughshares (72). On average, one in ten of all the poems in the anthology series were written by 25 poets. Within that cohort, the top five most represented are John Ashbery (21 appearances), Billy Collins (19), Charles Simic (18), Yusef Komunyakaa (16), Terrance Hayes (16), James Tate (16), Louise Glück (14), Robert Pinsky (14), and Sharon Olds (14). (Olds is the only one of this group to have not been a guest editor.) Taking a step back from that upper tier, we find that a quarter of all poems in The Best American Poetry were written by a slightly larger set of 83 poets, all of whom were included at least five times. The publications most often tapped for the anthology are similarly consolidated. Forty-one journals, nearly all mainstream publications and university-affiliated reviews, are represented at least 10 times, filling up the anthology with 47 percent of its content. If we focus on the guest editors, we find 360 of their poems spread across the series. In other words, 13 percent of The Best American Poetry is composed of poems by past or future editors of The Best American Poetry.
September 30, 2025 at 4:42 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Just finishing my coffee and reading this beautiful @janezwart.bsky.social poem that got nominated for Best of the Net. Love that it's "about" our commonplace phrases, but these neat lil' jigsawing stanzas cover a deep emotional core. So good!
@sundresspub.bsky.social @psalteryandlyre.bsky.social
First 1.5 stanzas of Jane Zwart's poem "i apologize for the inconvenience" in Psaltery & Lyre and miss begging to be pardoned; the poetry in it fit what I meant, I wanted someone to grant me the indulgence of being, of needing favors and water, I wanted someone to intuit that I spoke with cupped hands. The thing is people would prefer you excuse
September 30, 2025 at 12:19 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Update: I'm still mad about this, so I wrote a letter using MY OWN BRAIN to express MY OWN OPINION.

Today, urging a local org NOT to encourage uncritical AI use counts as writing.
I'm writing to express my concern and disappointment with your upcoming class offering about the "ethics" of AI in writing poetry. I am an elementary school teacher and previous HVWC workshop participant. Darren Wood's approach is dangerously uncritical and does a disservice to any teacher who signs up for the workshop as well as the students those teachers will then attempt to serve. Educators are sounding the alarm about AI use as a crisis in both high school and higher education. It is eroding students' critical thinking skills, homogenizing their output, and introducing falsehoods and hallucinations that students have no way to identify or combat. I cannot imagine how a high school educator could choose, in this moment, to run a class that ends up encouraging fellow teachers to allow further incursions of AI into teaching spaces. Writing is thinking. If students use large language models to bypass thinking, then they are not writing. They are not "writing poems" or practicing anything resembling human creativity. They are prompting an algorithm to regurgitate a chopped up melange of other people's stolen writing. In reading Darren's course description, I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt. I would like to imagine that he will engage with teachers about some of the following established facts about LLMs, such as: - LLMs are trained on stolen copyrighted material from thousands of authors (so encouraging writers to use AI is particularly insulting) - chatbots were involved in multiple teen suicides in the past year, encouraging minors toward self-harm and even helping them formulate their plans - LLMs consume huge amounts of electricity and fresh water, and the uptick in energy and water demands is already exacerbating environmental inequities and environmental racism, not to mention contributing to climate change through unchecked additional CO2 emissions
September 25, 2025 at 3:47 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
ok someone else said met gala but specifically: paging Billy Porter!
Billy Porter wearing black tuxedo gown on the Oscar's red carpet
September 24, 2025 at 5:12 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
So, Hudson Valley Writers Center wants ppl to pay for a poetry class about "the ethics of AI" in which they will "experiment with" writing poems USING AI.

This is aimed at HIGH SCHOOL English teachers.

Do they see how insulting this is to everyone involved? Line this man's pockets to peddle slop?
Screen cap of HV Writers Center marketing copy. WRITING POEMS IN AJ AGE OF AI: WORKSHOP FOR HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS In this intensive led by instructor Darren Wood (pictured in the screen cap, an ostensibly white & middle aged man) we will consider the dilemma that AI poses to teaching our students to write poems, discuss the ethics of using AI in classrooms, and experiment with AI as we write our own poems to understand how it could aid or limit our students.
September 18, 2025 at 2:35 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Fuck me up, Mary Ruefle!
Short Lecture on your Own Happiness by Mary Ruefle You know how to write poetry, it is all you need to be happy, but you will not be happy, you will be miserable, thinking you need so many other things, and in years and years of misery you have only one thing, as poets, to look forward to, the day you will not want what you haven't got, the thing you have got is poetry, let nothing cheat, steal, or deflect you from it, even poetry itself. Why are you sitting there? You should have fled before I finished the first sentence.
September 17, 2025 at 3:20 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Kinda how being a human feels today. (From Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet. And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more.
September 14, 2025 at 5:51 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Not sure I even know about the blog posts. This is what I remember
Deleted tweet from @BestAmPo on Twitter from October 8, 2023 that says "I stand with Israel" 3x with that country's flag emoji
September 6, 2025 at 1:57 AM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
Can't remember HOW this ended up on my tbr (library hold took ages to come in) but now I'm reading it and I definitely understand WHY it was on the list. Damn.
Cover of Star Wars Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire by Dr. Chris Kempshall Highlighted passage: there were those who had supported Palpatine during the war and voted him additional powers and controls because they believed he could be trusted with them. This is an important lesson for the galaxy moving forward: there will always be those who are prepared to accelerate the death of democracy if they believe power is being given to someone worthy.
September 2, 2025 at 9:48 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
It's September 1 - perfect day to read "September 1, 1939" by Auden. A poem that just keeps on being so necessary.
Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.
Be one of the ones to "show an affirming flame."
poets.org/poem/septemb...
All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
September 1, 2025 at 6:50 PM
chiaradilello.bsky.social
A bit of mis-translation that sums up this time of year quite nicely ⚠️🍂
Safety label translated from English to French. It should say RISQUE DE CHUTE meaning risk of fall, but instead says RISQUE D'AUTOMNE meaning risk of autumn (fall).
August 31, 2025 at 2:07 AM