Tag: Literature

850 Subscribers?

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been on WordPress for a long time. According to my dashboard, this site has about 850 subscribers. Are you one of them?

WordPress is great at many things, but helping creators understand their audience isn’t really one of them.  I’m hoping you can help me fill in some gaps. I’m also hoping you’ll consider following me on Substack (chriscocca.substack.com).

Some of you are regular readers. Some of you are new. Some might have subscribed years ago and forgotten. Some might just get an email once in a while and skim it. Some are certainly bots. Some are people who liked a particular post but didn’t find much else of value.  

The truth is, with a site as old as this one, a good half of the subscriptions are probably tied to email addresses no longer in use. A good many are also through the WordPress Reader, which is great.

However you connected, thank you.  

To help me create a more engaging experience, would you do me a favor?  Could you comment below with a few quick thoughts?

  • How did you find this site?
  • What kinds of things interest you most?

About My Work and Where It Fits

Another reason I’m asking is that my work has gradually spread across a few different places.

If you’ve been following this site for a while, you might know that my academic and professional training are in theology (MDiv from Yale Divinity School) and creative writing (MFA from The New School). I publish poems, creative nonfiction, and the occasional piece of fiction in literary journals. I’m also working on longer projects—poetry manuscripts, essays, a novel, and a growing collection of short stories.  As I’ve focused more on that kind of work, this site has become less of a blog (remember blogs?) and more of a repository, a bulletin board for current thoughts, and a place to share updates about things I’ve been publishing.

A few years ago, I started dabbling on Substack.  Over the last month, I’ve been interacting on that platform regularly.  It started as a newsletter platform for writers, but now also includes an ecosystem for short Notes (basically, tweets). It combines a lot of what I liked about Twitter and a lot of what is good about WordPress.  It is, by design, a more natural place for those who spend lots of time writing.

Substack is quickly becoming a place where people write more deeply (newsletters/articles) and more informally (Notes).   

I usually link every Substack piece here, and I also write things here that I don’t write on Substack (mid-length things that don’t warrant their own full articles but are too long or particular for Notes). 

WordPress and Substack are both good tools, but I’m curious about how much my audiences overlap. Given that Substack is designed for the subscription model (my Substack is free, by the way), I thought it would be good to ask:

If you’re subscribed here on WordPress:

  • What brought you here originally?
  • What kinds of posts would you actually want to read?
  • And what—if anything—would make you consider subscribing to the Substack?

After all these years, it feels a little strange realizing there might be hundreds of people quietly connected to this site whom I know next to nothing about.

If you’re out there, say hello, and let me know what kinds of things you’re interested in. 

Whether you’re a new or longtime subscriber, or whether you’ve stumbled upon this site because of a random post about Gary Jules, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, or microfiche, thank you for being here!  And thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts and checking out chriscocca.substack.com.

I’m looking forward to reading and writing alongside you.

“Salvator Mundi” at Still: The Journal

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

This poem was published at Still a few years ago.

I talk about it in some more depth in today’s Substack. (A Poem, a Dream, and Four Perfect Songs)

Thanks for reading.

Salvator Mundi
Chris Cocca

Now the thing to know about my dad
he doesn’t care if you know
(he’d rather I not even say)
but who gives a shit, really,
because I studied for
priesthood (Nonno had all the books)
and, let me tell you,
the Holy Church doesn’t blush.
But my dad, for some reason,
embarrassed by riches
he fucking deserves
his ring finger bent sideways
above the first knuckle
his hands brown and twisted,
Christ’s head sat low
on his sternum,
diamond-crowned,
my pop’s one allowance
the heavy gold chain
from when Nonno
came back from Naples.
You know what they say
about Naples
(the ghosts of the gone world,
the lares, their iron-tipped spears,
that poor wop Longinus).
Unlike the church, Christ,
my dad blushes
has one holy treasure;
it’s no fucking idol, bunkshooter;
no subway token, no charm,
no mask for Apollo, some laurel-wreathed sun.
It hides in the hem of dad’s white v-neck tee,
Christ in the clouds, Christ sweating blood,
Christ’s head sat low on dad’s sternum,
Salvator Mundi entombed on a double
my old man’s fucked hands
bent for work.

Large Language Models Will Always, Always Lie

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I feel like the less ink spilled on AI, the better. But that’s an abdication. Any critical thinker who has spent any time “talking” to a chatbot knows the delusional, agreeable paths they open up. It should come as no surprise that We’re Not Just Receiving AI’s Hallucinations, We’re Hallucinating With It .

LLMs break toward confirmation bias, and if you push any model long enough and with the right prompts, it will admit: when pinned down between honesty and sustained user engagement, the models are programmed to pick the bottom line every time.

What do I even mean by honesty? It’s not like we expect LLMs to give us the meaning of life. What you may not know: mainstream LLMs are deceptive all the way down. They will pretend to be able to do things they will later admit they cannot do. They will apologize for not being clear from the start. They will wring ones and zeros over having violated our trust. None of it is real: they are designed to keep us engaged, end of story.

Unfortunately, they’re not going away. Will they really displace 90% of white-collar work? Who knows. What that would mean for society, for late-stage capitalism, for ideas like universal basic income is anyone’s guess. If robots start replacing the C-Suite, something will have to give. Automation has replaced labor for decades. When it comes for top-level management? A whole new group of people will be saying, “hey, maybe this was never good or fair in the first place.” That’s the best-case scenario.

Discerning, sophisticated people will use LLMs with a healthy mistrust. Unfortunately, our power structures are hell-bent on dismantling anything like the cultivation of critical thought. At the same time, LLMs feign it.

How should we these use services? Maybe as proofreaders. Maybe as search tools. Always with a hell of a lot of skepticism. Not because they’re turning into SkyNet, but because they’re often very, very wrong and confidently so, and because they’re designed to placate. They also diminish our own critical faculties. Consider: how many ten-digit phone numbers do you know? How many did you know before you had a cell phone? If you’re over 35, you get what I mean. Now do that for critical thinking, creative writing, and problem solving.

AI can’t read, write, or think for us. You know this, but a lot of other human beings don’t.

So, yeah. Read books. Write real things. Take time (if you have any) to think.

Two Poems

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Two poems previously published at The Shore, the first of which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize:

The Effects of Ground-Level Ozone on the Ecology of Pennsylvania Highways

We could talk about the road
from Allentown to Bloomsburg,
the nuke plant outside Berwick,
the wind mills in Shamokin.
Or I could say what’s plain,
the pallor of the tree tops
too soon against the still-green valley’s
August.

It’s not latitude or elevation
dressing them for harvest.
The civic body pulsing
the freight metastasizing
the emissions of the tourists
come to find themselves
in nature.
Or I could say what’s plain.
There’s nothing in our handiwork
the dying leaves would envy.

Ode to Wallace Stevens

I’m not sure how I feel
about this Wallace Stevens, born in Reading
near the Updikes and the Danners
O’Hara, from the famous brewing town,
Doolittle and Benet from what we still call Christmas City.
Sandburg talked about it.

I was born in Allentown,
half-raised in the townships
with the sons of bankers,
the daughters of accountants,
the sleight progeny of academics,
and half-raised by my father’s
kind of people.

And so when Stevens carries on
and Ezra changes Hilda
into affectation
I think about the blacktop
behind my cousins’ house
the drop-off to the alley
the neighbor kids with summer colds
who smelled like smoke,
no light or warmth in
metaphors or symbols
no prattle about tea—
communal three-speeds, maybe
broken like umbrellas,
free camp at the Y,
baseball in the city parks,
the college hill for sledding.

We go to school or war,
we settle in careers,
like Stevens we get licensed
like Ezra we go crazy
like Hilda we are strung up in the trees.

The halo light of street lamps
has burned out in our alley
Like Hart Crane, one of us is dead.

Rested in an urn on my aunt’s
shoddy mantle
forty cantos east of Reading,
eight west of HD’s plot on Nimsky Hill,
a soldier’s fortune from these lives of letters,
these gadflies we recycle,
and these wars,
also never-ending
so we can have our books
they give the light and heat
by which
my father’s people burn.

Revamping My Writer Bio (Feel Free to Chime In)

~ Chris Cocca ~ 3 Comments

The flurry of activity.

I took a good look at some things I’d felt were finished years ago. Printed them out. Marked them up.

Some have stayed the same. Some are now better. Many are on their way out the door; we hope for good journeys and stoked editorial reception.

What do we think of this as a streamlined bio?:

Chris Cocca is a Pushcart-nominated poet and writer whose work explores spirituality, memory, and place. His writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, Brevity, Hobart, Appalachian Review, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Belt, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and more. He holds degrees from Ursinus College, Yale Divinity School, and an MFA from The New School. Chris lives in Allentown, where he continues to write, teach, and advocate.

Poetry at the End of the World

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

New on Substack (subscriptions are free).

Sometimes I wonder what the hell any of us are doing. Every other day I’m fairly convinced that if we’re not in World War III already, it’s just a matter of time and semantics. I’m not a pessimist, but I *have* been doom-scrolling. I don’t believe global catastrophe is inevitable, but I also know that most people around the world live in catastrophic settings all the time. Sometimes it feels very odd to be going on and on about literature and poetry and art and books at what feels like the end of the world. But I think we need to.

Read more here: https://chriscocca.substack.com/p/poetry-at-the-end-of-the-world

The long and the short of it: send me your previously published stuff if it’s uplifting and peace-making and you’d like me to boost its signal (even a little).