Via Negativa

There is no satisfaction quite like the satisfaction that comes from destroying a misbegotten poem — especially when it can be done with the click of a mouse. Removing a tick, by contrast, is much more difficult: grasping it firmly and pulling just hard enough so the skin stretches into a tent around its buried head, this paper-thin creature, trying to get it to withdraw on its own. And when that fails, sterilizing the tip of a sewing needle with a cigarette lighter and digging for the severed mouthparts. I was once almost that thin, I think, as I work the needle into my abdomen’s soft gibbous moon.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Humor, Memoir
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I am thankful for pine needles.
I am thankful for uncivil engineering.
I am thankful for rapture-ready Christians.
I am thankful for my balls.
I am thankful for synergistic competencies across solution implementation, product/platform technologies and selling channels.
I am thankful for Potted Meat Product.
I am thankful for like, whatever.
I am thankful for standards-based curriculum mapping.
I am thankful for palpable resentments on a stick.
I am thankful for Thursday.
I am thankful for fresh pink pencil erasers.
I am thankful for leveraging on-demand business intelligence solutions.
I am thankful for the Incredible Hulk of dogs, Wendy the whippet.
I am thankful for the hypertext transfer protocol and to the republic for which it stands, except where otherwise noted.
I am thankful for “88″ sounding like “fortune fortune” in Cantonese.
I am thankful for habeas corpus, Corpus Christi, and corpus delicti with special sauce.
I am thankful for gratitude.
I am thankful for two-headed snakes blinking in sync.
I am thankful for latent-trajectory and latent-growth-curve models for a dependent variable having ordered categories.
I am thankful for every serviceable device.
I am thankful for sand.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Humor, Riffs
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One with the head of a crocodile, one wearing the fresh skin of a newborn just beginning to lose its glow, one in a trench coat and shoes black and shiny enough to confuse the moon into setting an hour early, one who sniffs and shuffles papers, one with the wings of small bats neatly folded into the clean and green coffin of his pocket, one who claps loudly at inappropriate junctures, one with an extruded plastic handshake and a business card printed with the wrong email, one who seeks absolution in the polite smiles of his opponents the birdwatchers and trout fishermen, one who used to be the most powerful senator in the state and now turns his back on the public hearing — the assembled citizenry with their ignorant concerns — to bark into a clam shell too narrow for the sound of surf.

For more objective accounts of the hearing (at which I testified on behalf of Juniata Valley Audubon) see the Altoona Mirror and Centre Daily Times.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Birds, Personal/Political, Riffs
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We like to think of poets as being a bit like shamans. The Greek word poetes means “maker,” and I gather it had thaumaturgic overtones at one time. True shamans, of course, almost never seek the role, but have it thrust upon them as the result of an extreme spiritual or existential crisis. In her recent “Considering the Other” column at Read Write Poem, Ren Powell noted that some people harbor a similar notion about poets. “They feel that the title of poet is something they should not take upon themselves, but rather something that should be conferred by others.”

Well, maybe. But writing poetry is actually a pretty ordinary thing, not at all comparable to faith-healing or traveling to the spirit world. To me, it’s a craft just like woodworking, maybe slightly more advanced than hanging drywall, but not much. Poetry may be necessary to maintain the vitality of a language and may help keep the mind limber, but that doesn’t make it the special province of elites — quite the opposite. As the Nicaraguan poet Roque Dalton once wrote, “Poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” It doesn’t require any special kind of intelligence to write it. Anyone who uses language — any human being — can, and probably should, learn to play with language in an artful manner. It might have to take the form of rap or rock lyrics to gain true mass acceptance, and its evil twin the slogan may threaten to erase the boundary between truth and lies, but in one form or another, poetry is virtually inescapable.

If anything distinguishes a poet from any other language-user, it’s her extreme sensitivity to nuance. Shouldn’t we worry, then, that so many poets find the label “poet” more than a little uncomfortable? Ren’s column was titled, “I Hereby Confer on You the Title of Poet,” and her conclusion was: stop acting ashamed about the title. If you write poetry, you’re a poet. But the discomfort is perhaps not so easily exorcised. In my case, I’m wary of reinforcing the misconception that being a poet is what matters. I don’t want to be anything. I just want to write.

And then there’s the problem that my prose and poetry are constantly shape-shifting into one another to the point where I can barely tell them apart anymore. I could just call myself a writer, but that word too has somehow gained a ridiculous mystique. So I’m happy instead to call myself a blogger or an editor — maligned occupations barely more respectable than a garbage collector. Then again, in my ideal society, garbage collectors would be among the most revered citizens, entrusted with the training of all corporate managers and public servants. My neighbor pumps septic tanks for a living, and he is, I’ve come to learn, a very wise man.

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Much of the preceding comes from a comment I made on Ren’s column — actually one of the less interesting comments in that thread. It seemed just barely worth preserving here.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Poets and poetry
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Two days ago, the small pile of qarrtsiluni’s first chapbook still sittting on the end of my desk caught my eye. We’d sent out a bunch of copies of Pamela Johnson Parker’s A Walk Through the Memory Palace to the chapbook contest entrants, and a few for lit mag review, and these were the ones left over from that initial big wholesale order. I had a sudden, fairly obvious idea: Why not try giving them away to bloggers who’d be willing to commit to writing a review of at least three paragraphs? Sure, anyone can review the contents of the book, since it’s all online, but nothing beats having the paper copy in your hands. I emailed my co-editor Beth, and she wrote back immediately to say “Sure!”

So mid-afternoon on Saturday I posted the offer to the qarrtsiluni news blog, linked to it from our Twitter account, and circulated the link via direct message to the 339 members of the qarrtsiluni Facebook group. I said that the review didn’t need to use academic language, and that we welcomed any kind of blog — we weren’t looking exclusively for book- or poetry-bloggers. We said that supplies were limited to just ten copies, though subsequent to posting the announcement I scrounged up another five and we decided to add those as well. Emails began to pour in, just as we’d hoped. We had our first ten bloggers within about six hours, and all fifteen by this morning.

The respondents were diverse in terms of location and the size and focus of their blogs (though most were literary blogs, most of the time), and it wasn’t until I was addressing the cover letters that I noticed something peculiar: 14 of the 15 were female. Why so few men?

Well, for starters, only about a third of our Facebook group members are male (I counted). That makes sense based on my own observations of how people behave on Facebook: women are more social than men, and thus, perhaps, more likely to join groups like ours (even though like most Facebook groups it’s pretty inactive except for the occasional announcements we send out). It’s harder to know the gender of Twitterers, but scanning through our 402 followers, it appears that closer to 50 percent are male.

Other possible contributing factors that occur to me:

• Maybe the majority of literary bloggers are female (I’m guessing between 60 and 70 percent, but I could be way off).
• Female bloggers as a rule might be more interested in reading and reviewing books (as opposed to — say — pontificating).
• Male bloggers otherwise inclined to review poetry might not have been as interested since the book had a female author.

It’s this last possibility that disturbs me.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Blogs and Blogging, Personal/Political
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I can remember how it felt but I can’t remember the feeling itself.

I was living at the time between quotation marks, a perilous existence. People who lived in their cars looked down on me.

I remember running my hands over and over her bare scalp — the scandal of it.

The woods aren’t even there anymore. Someone’s sunroom occupies that very spot.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Memoir, Photos, Poems & poem-like things
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It’s true, he does. Well, O.K., he actually calls it a log — an artlog. Go visit.

What, you’re still here? Look, if you’ve been reading Via Negativa much at all this year, from the various comments he’s left you must already have some idea of the man’s generosity and way with words, not to mention his stunning artwork, as exemplified by the Tempations of Solitude paintings I wrote about. All three qualities are on display at his brand-new blog, which reproduces the contents of letters he’s been sending out to a few friends over the past eight days chronicling the progress of a major new work.

This ‘Artlog’ has been set up to provide a glimpse into my studio and the way in which I work. I’m kicking off with a day by day photographic diary of the current painting on my easel. (A bit of an experiment as I’ve never done this before, so bear with me.) The subject is Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds. The idea had been long gestating. I had a notion to conjure a more threatening mood than the usual bucolic approaches to the story. The key image that kept niggling at me was a violent maelstrom of birds with the saint at the heart of it. Almost as though he’s being mobbed. (Tippi Hedren comes to mind in Hitchcock’s The Birds.)

I’ve thought for a while that Clive should be blogging, and I’m glad he finally seems to agree. Since he was already an inveterate letter-writer, I didn’t think it would require too big a shift in his patterns, though granted, I am a shameless evangelist for this medium. It will be interesting to see how Clive uses it. Anyway, do go say hi and check out those birds!

Posted by Dave Bonta in Art, Blogs and Blogging
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