by Holly Jahangiri | Feb 16, 2025
Each month, Poets Northwest meets in NW Houston to share poems and tips on writing poetry. Next month we’ll be focusing on revision, as well. This month, we were challenged to write an ekphrastic poem about a local artist or work of art displayed locally. It was there that I learned from friend and fellow member, Lynn G., about the Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts – located about 15 minutes from me. I must live under a rock. I’ve been to the courthouse and I’ve been to the Barbara Bush Library, both of which are walking distance from the Pearl.
I called Lynn on Thursday to tell her I was going there to “do my homework.” I was already four blocks from my house when I asked her, “Wanna come?”
To my surprised delight, she said “Why not?” and pulled into the parking lot about 10 seconds after I got there.
“An artist date!” I think we both mentally pulled out our old copies of The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron.
Below, you’ll find my “homework,” an ekphrastic poem based on a work of art by Caroline Z. Marcos entitled, “Ocean Biome.” Several works of art inspired me, but this one tempted me to explore the images more deeply.
Nick Thacker, whom I met at last year’s Oklahoma Writers Federation Inc. (OWFI) Annual Conference, presented a session called “Write 80,000 Words in a Day.” I’ll admit that while I am not one of the rabid AI haters, I rolled my eyes at him and whispered, as he tried to convince me to stay, that the only way to produce that much output was with AI. I have too much professional pride to let AI write for me. And any AI images I use? I don’t ask friends to do free labor for me and I won’t pay for blog header images. I don’t trust “found on internet” freebies. And my own photos don’t always “go” with what I’m writing. But for anything involving a profit, like illustrations for a children’s book? You bet I’d pay a real artist.
That was probably a bad example, as I have yet to make a real profit from my children’s books, but you know what I mean – I hope.
“AI, but not what you think,” Nick said. “Stick around. You may be pleasantly surprised.” I did, and I was. He wasn’t suggesting the use of generative AI to write those 80,000 words after all. And (not) being from Missouri, but being somewhat skeptical, I tested his suggestions out right there during his session. He uses dictation – something I’m still too self-conscious to do – to draft the novel, then uses AI, acting as a proofreader/copy-editor to clean up grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It’s brilliant. And yes, you still have to read it and fix a few errors – it’s far from perfect and still quite human-centered.
One of my favorite ways to use AI as a tool is to analyze, list strengths and weaknesses in my writing, and offer suggestions. I have never seen it suggest its own words, and wouldn’t use them if it did. AI writes doggerel, at best. It can recite the rules of formal verse, but rarely manages to follow them. It can invent new forms – which is a fun new pastime of mine – but you have to be careful and check its work to ensure that it hasn’t just renamed an existing form.
As a critic, though, it is competent. I use it, occasionally, to ensure that my metaphors and similes aren’t too much of a leap – figuring that if AI gets the message I’m trying to convey, a human reader should have no trouble understanding it. I use it to make sure that symbolism is neither too obscure nor too obvious and cliché, to catch little speed-bumps and unintended repetition. It does a pretty decent job. And it offers constructive criticism without nastiness or sugar-coating, often treading where humans fear to tread in a misguided belief that heaping nothing but unconditional praise on a writer’s head is helpful. Sometimes, that praise is an understandable fear, like traversing a minefield. See Delicate Sensibilities. For real poets, it’s more like… | by Holly Jahangiri | Medium
As with human critique, it’s important to know what rings true and what makes no sense in the context of the writer’s vision. Here’s an example of where I used AI through three revisions of the following ekphrastic poem: ChatGPT Poem Analysis, Strengths & Weaknesses.
I think that ChatGPT is a little limited in its ability to “see” the artwork in question, though some image generators are able to analyze and describe an image. So the comments about the flowers and the “comet-fish” are not on point; I clarified the fish with its “tail on fire” but ignored ChatGPT’s suggestions about the flowers. Still, it was all just food for thought, and I agree with Cat Farts (my nickname for ChatGPT) that the last version is the strongest of the three, and I appreciate the feedback.
by Holly Jahangiri | Feb 6, 2025
If you’re not a poet, you may still find this useful – and you’re more than welcome to give it a try!
If you are writing for yourself, only, and not for publication, you can mostly ignore my advice about formatting everything in Times New Roman, 12pt, 1″ margins all around, blah blah blah… but trust me when I say that if you hope anyone but you will ever publish your work, you’d best get disciplined about reading submissions guidelines, first, and if they don’t explicitly specify formatting requirements, it’s Times New Roman, 12pt, 1″ margins all around. Don’t bother arguing about how it “looks prettier” with some other font – arguing this point will only get you labeled “argumentative, difficult to work with.”
Got that? If yes, you’ve probably just climbed over the backs of 70% of submissions and increased your odds of publication with that tip, alone. Here’s a freebie for you:
StaffordPoetryTemplate
This zip file contains a Microsoft Word Template (there’s a macro in there – it’s supposed to be in there – so if your antivirus or your Microsoft Word throw a fit, it’s your choice but I’d allow it if you like writing acrostic poetry). The zip file also contains a little htm document that you can run on your local drive to prep a poem for posting on Facebook. It’s not perfect, but it does a better job when copy/pasting of keeping your line breaks and horizontal spacing than just copy/pasting straight from Word. If it’s helpful, you can thank Dossy Shiobara for it. (You can open it in a text editor like Notepad to see what it does. It’s not particularly fancy and contains nothing “dangerous.”)
A member of The Stafford Challenge (2025 Cohort) asked, this morning, about organizing poems. I have tried numerous approaches, but the one that works best for me is to keep each years worth in a single Microsoft Word document. It is a very simple document: there is a Table of Contents (automatically generated from headings, of course – do I look like I have time to manually update page numbers??) and each page has a PoemTitle (a style I created: TNR + bold, 12pt.) followed by PoemBody (TNR, single-spaced lines). That is it. Oh – I got fancy with headers but there’s really no point since they don’t carry over when the document is split for publication.
You’re not going to submit 300+ poems to any journal all at once, surely. So rather than get in there and tediously make individual poem files one at a time, why not just collect them all and periodically extract them from the big file as individual files – in bulk?
How to Split a Microsoft Word Document into Individual Documents
You MUST use Heading Styles. In the following instructions, my poem titles are all set to a custom PoemTitle style, which is defined as a Level 1. (Heading 1 is, by default, defined as Level 1. You can define your own styles to be any Level you want them to be, and can then include or exclude them from your Table of Contents and Indices and format them any way you want to.)
IMPORTANT: The following instructions will create individual files which will be linked to a single Master Document. Use of Master Documents in Word is tricky and not recommended except for accomplishing a particular task (like creating individual files from a single large document). In fact, I’m going to strongly suggest that you first create a special folder on your local hard drive for this project, then put a copy of your large Word doc into it. Do not touch the original document for the rest of this exercise! Always, always, always have at least one backup of your work.
- Read the previous paragraph twice. When you have done that, you should be ready for the next steps.
- From the Word menu, working in your new copy of the original, select View > Outline.
- From the Show Level: drop down menu, select Level 1 (or whatever you’ve defined as your PoemTitle), then click Show Document.
- Select the headings (as shown below) that you want to save as individual documents. DO NOT SELECT THE TOC HEADINGS. In the Master Document section of the Ribbon, click Create.
- You will see something like this:
- You can double-click the document icon (circled in red) or CTRL+right-click on the file location to open the individual file (now known as a “subdocument”). You can use File Explorer to go to the location (highlighted above in yellow). If you see text instead of a file folder location, toggle the Expand/Collapse Subdocuments button shown on the Ribbon.
NOTE: Microsoft Office stores temporary cached files in a folder called: \AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.MSO
If you are working on a large file stored on OneDrive or other cloud storage, this is probably where the embedded, individual files are located. Moving them will destroy the integrity of the master document, which is why I recommend doing this only on your local hard drive. If working from a folder on your local hard drive, the individual files should be automatically created and saved for you in the same folder – this is much easier to deal with.
If you move these documents or rename the folder, all the links will be broken and your Master Document will be empty. You can always insert them, one by one, but this is tedious and not worth your time. My recommendation is to delete the Master Document (keep those individual files you created!) and repeat this process as needed to create individual files from a separate, large document. Remember: always work from a backup copy.
by Holly Jahangiri | Feb 1, 2025
There’s a list of “naughty words” floating around that apparently, government entities have been asked, in a very Orwellian directive, to expunge from their trainings, documents, and websites. Having looked at this list, I think those who’ve issued the directives might be better served by simply shutting up altogether.
Words, Words, Words
Here’s the list (so far) if you’re wondering why so many government websites are not working well today. I wouldn’t know where to begin, were I given the monumental task of removing words like “access” and “binary” from a user’s guide. I might gamely try, though, if I were feeling particularly subversive. The words “malicious compliance” spring merrily to mind. I just learned that term, yesterday. Also encountered, this week, were the delightful phrases, “Go f*** yourself sideways with a porcupine” and “You rank and wretched puke horse.”
ability
acceptance
access
affirmative
aggression
allyship
androgyne
asexual
belonging
bias
binary
bisexual
black
culture
deia
discrimination
diversity
eeo
empathy
empowerment
equitable
equity
ethnicity
fairness
gay
gender
gender dysphoria
handicap
homosexual
impartial
inclusion
inclusive
indigenous
intersectionality
intersex
justice
lgbtq
lgbtq+
lgbtqia
multiculturalism
native american
pansexual
power dynamics
privilege
queer
race
redistribution
representation
safe space
social justice
trans gender
transgender
transsexual
transvestite
under served communities
white
There are so many things I could say about each of these, but I will leave it to your imagination. I’ll admit to a small chuckle at the thought of having to delete all of the “white papers” that have no doubt been written at taxpayer expense. All reference to the “Department of Justice”? Gone. Pretty sure the Supreme Court is rolling nine pairs of eyes right about now. “Access” and “binary”? How will the techs maintain the computer systems, once all these words have been redacted or expunged?
Poetry from Putrescence
Instead, I thought these words should live and thrive—that they would make great prompts for my fellow poets! Here’s one of mine, so far:
Pondering Matthew 6:14
What’s empathy but an ability
to look beyond our biased binary
aggression: us or them. No nuanced choice—
discrimination hears no reasoned voice.
Death doesn’t ask consent, gives no respite
from wanton acts of bigotry and spite
Destruction answers; it’s affirmative—
diversity is dead. Alternative
ideas like equity not welcome here.
Conform at once—or die, and disappear
like fragile words that fall from satellites,
are lost to censored silence, endless nights.
There are no underserved communities
where allyship from privilege is a tease.
This conformation culture must please God
but I think their Christ might find it very odd.
As always, if you’re up for the challenge, please join in the fun – comment here with your poetry or a link to where we can all find it. And if you have the time, please read my latest piece on Medium, “There’s No Such Thing as Sex, Now.“
by Holly Jahangiri | Jan 31, 2025
I mentioned a few times that I have deleted nearly 15 years of my posts on Facebook. A few friends asked me “How did you do that?” because the obvious answer would have been to delete my Facebook account entirely and leave it vulnerable to being hijacked by spammers and scammers and other miscreants that are so numerous on that, and other social media platforms.
The slightly better answer, in short? It’s easy, but it is tedious and time-consuming. It’s something to do while you’re watching TV. Better than doomscrolling the moment you wake up. Probably not as effective as you might hope in preventing content misuse by Meta, since they don’t actually promise to honor your deletion request immediately, or after the 30-day “don’t you want to change your mind” period ends, or after the additional 90-day “we’ll get around to it if we feel like it” ends.
Here are the relevant portions of Meta’s Terms of Service as they stand today, 1/31/2025:
2. Permission to use content you create and share: Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This means, for example, that if you share a photo on Facebook, you give us permission to store, copy, and share it with others (again, consistent with your settings) such as Meta Products or service providers that support those products and services. This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems.
3. Deleting Your Content: You can delete individual content you share, post, and upload at any time. In addition, all content posted to your personal account will be deleted if you delete your account. Learn more about how to delete your account. Account deletion does not automatically delete content that you post as an admin of a page or content that you create collectively with other users, such as photos in Shared Albums which may continue to be visible to other album members.
It may take up to 90 days to delete content after we begin the account deletion process or receive a content deletion request. If you send content to trash, the deletion process will automatically begin in 30 days unless you chose to delete the content sooner. While the deletion process for such content is being undertaken, the content is no longer visible to other users. After the content is deleted, it may take us up to another 90 days to remove it from backups and disaster recovery systems.
Content will not be deleted within 90 days of the account deletion or content deletion process beginning in the following situations:
- where your content has been used by others in accordance with this license and they have not deleted it (in which case this license will continue to apply until that content is deleted);
- where deletion within 90 days is not possible due to technical limitations of our systems, in which case, we will complete the deletion as soon as technically feasible; or
- where immediate deletion would restrict our ability to:
- investigate or identify illegal activity or violations of our terms and policies (for example, to identify or investigate misuse of our Products or systems);
- protect the safety, integrity, and security of our Products, systems, services, our employees, and users, and to defend ourselves;
- comply with legal obligations for the preservation of evidence, including data Meta Companies providing financial products and services preserve to comply with any record keeping obligations required by law; or
- comply with a request of a judicial or administrative authority, law enforcement or a government agency;
in which case, the content will be retained for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which it has been retained (the exact duration will vary on a case-by-case basis).
In each of the above cases, this license will continue until the content has been fully deleted.
4. Permission to use your name, profile picture, and information about your actions with ads and sponsored or commercial content: You give us permission to use your name and profile picture and information about actions you have taken on Facebook next to or in connection with ads, offers, and other sponsored or commercial content that we display across our Products, without any compensation to you. For example, we may show your friends that you are interested in an advertised event or have liked a Facebook Page created by a brand that has paid us to display its ads on Facebook. Ads and content like this can be seen only by people who have your permission to see the actions you’ve taken on Meta Products. You can learn more about your ad settings and preferences.
Got all that? So, on the one hand, when you send some piece of content to the Trash bin on Meta, that should start the clock. You can choose to retrieve that content from Trash at any time during the 30 days unless you empty the Trash itself. (Windows users should recognize this as similar to the Recycle bin.) That’s all well and good, but then Meta claims an additional 90-day period during which they’ll start the actual deletion if and when they get around to it. We’re up to 120 days, now, for those of you who are counting. During this time – and possibly forever – you will see things pop up in Memories that shouldn’t be there anymore, putting into question whether Facebook honors its own TOS or not. (It’s a rhetorical question.) Note the weasel words: “where deletion within 90 days is not possible due to technical limitations of our systems, in which case, we will complete the deletion as soon as technically feasible” and the claim of license in perpetuity. Till we get around to it, basically.< /br>< /br>
But it made me feel better to do it. They may already have used my content to train AI. They may keep my content haunting their servers until the sheer weight of their data center causes a sinkhole. I don’t advise bothering with this unless you’re just incredibly bored and need to do something with your hands. But here’s how, if it makes you feel any better.
- Request a backup of all your Facebook data.
- Wait until you are notified by Facebook that your backup is ready for download (this usually takes a few days – they are incredibly slow – you’d think hamsters actually ran the servers or something). They will email you a link.
- Download all your data, then open or extract the backup to see what is and what is not in it. You will not receive your friends’ contact information for privacy reasons.
- Now, go to Settings & Privacy > Activity Log.
- From Filters, choose a Date range. (Or don’t – I did not want to delete my most recent activity, so I started with the oldest years and worked forward to the most recent month.)
- Choose the type of content you want to delete (there is no nuclear option, here – you will have to do this bit by bit by tedious, boring bit). The screenshot only shows about half of the different things you’ll find under your Activity log. I started with Posts. After all, once a Post is deleted, all the conversation on it also disappears. This seemed the most efficient approach.
- Posts expands to show this:
- Next, Select Your posts, photos, and videos. To the right, you should now see a list of posts within your selected date range with check boxes to their left. By default, Facebook will only show you 25 of them at a time. If you want to do this the SUPER tedious way, click All > Trash. After about 5 times of this, you discover exactly how much crap you’ve been posting on Facebook over the years and you will be tempted just to give up. That’s their hope, anyway. I can only assume that’s their hope, or surely Meta would’ve made bulk deletion easier by now. It’s better than LinkedIn, which doesn’t have any bulk deletion capability at all, other than “Delete my account.”LESS tedious method: Scroll down the page until you can see approximately 6-7 screens worth of posts. (The hard limit on this is 250, so if you select more than 250 at a time, you’ll get an error and have to start over again. Now that’s what I call the MOST tedious method!) Selecting All will only select what’s visible. If it says you’ve selected 251 or more posts, uncheck anything over 249. Why 249? Beats hell out of me. Leave 250 after you get the error saying you’ve exceeded the maximum number of posts you can delete, and you’re likely just to get the same error over again and have to start from scratch. This will make more sense the first time you do it. After the fourth or fifth time, the painfulness of it sinks in and you’re not likely to forget this tip.Select 250, Trash. Repeat. Ad nauseum. This could take weeks, if you’ve been on Facebook for more than a minute.
Now, just when you think you’ve got everything, wait a few days more. Go back and spot check by year. I can almost guarantee there will be undeleted posts still lurking there.
Explore all the other sections of this Activity log page. Then check out the section under Settings & Privacy called Content preferences.
You may be surprised by what’s in there, and I can guarantee that deleting most of it will help to clean up your Facebook feed, at least till you gunk it all up again. And you will – never mind your best intentions – unless you delete your account or just refuse to log into it again.
by Holly Jahangiri | Jan 30, 2025
Yesterday’s chosen poetry form was the Contrapuntal – which seemed much easier than I thought, at first, being essentially the solo version of a Tapestry form – a collaborative form that Necia Campbell and I wrote together last year, and which appears towards the end of the recently released, Poems from the Rebel Outpost. The previous link will take you to Barnes & Noble; to buy from Amazon, click here.
But then again, the Tapestry form might have been easier because it was a collaboration, and in the Contrapuntal, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand’s doing, destroying the element of surprise and risking too much cohesion, in a way. In other words, the counterpoint may be less of a counterpoint for knowing exactly where the poet wants to lead.
Progress, They Call It (a Contrapuntal Poem)
progress, they call it: slashing, burning, progress—
can’t stop the forward motion of a nation!
encroaching, elbowing, uprooting the living
who would want to thwart the people’s will, or kill the
canopy of verdant sunlit trees that once breathed
sweet aroma of crisply minted bills enrobed in leather with
our exhalations. we breathed theirs until they gasped
the faintest whiff of manliness, invoking will,
their last, until they fell to saw and ax, bulldozed
determination. ancestors’ words forgotten as new money’s
burned to make a way for strip malls and
wealth, unfettered by past sense, decorum, grows,
power lines—such progress don’t go well with pines—
it goes to feed the engines of industry that only thrive
incinerating cedar selves in swirling smoke
coal-fired on the backs of miners, steelworkers, “little people”—
their ashes drifting heavenwards and carried
those dispensable, extra mouths to feed until
on the santa ana winds to add a colored layer
the robots shove them off the ledge
on the cliffs of palo duro choking out the summer sun.
I was first introduced to the form by the poet Mervyn Seivwright, who is kind enough to let me call him friend and mentor. He made it look easy, with poems like, “Manhood’s Gambit,” but that’s the trick of any good writer. It should look natural and almost effortless. It’s not.
Today’s “alphabet challenge” poem, which I won’t publish here (I have other plans for that one!), uses the Diminishing Verse form.
The following poem was inspired by another participant in The Stafford Challenge who, bafflingly, was advised by AI to “doglificate their love life.” I suggested that even if the mean girls couldn’t make “fetch” happen, maybe a bunch of poets could make “doglificate” happen and in the process, confuse the hell out of the machine. I have never claimed not to be mischievously subversive.
Doglificate
We have been ill-advised in this, AI’s insistent
urging to “doglificate our lives.” Imagine
docile canine friends pontificating
from a coffee table soapbox or
the nearest fragrant hydrant hoping
they might radicate the notion that
the dogs should be in charge? Oh, woe
to cats and tender, tasty humans then –
our fate, thus sealed, as we
are slowly licked to death, complacent,
grinning, thinking we had any say at all.
Please – whether you consider yourself a poet or not – join in the fun. Let’s make this word, “doglificate,” a thing. Short story writers, you, too! Come back and post a link to your doglificate creations in the comments so we can all enjoy them.
