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On vacation

I am taking a few days off to go camping and to visit some blogger friends in Montreal. There will be no updates to Via Negativa or the Smorgasblog until at least next Tuesday. See you later, and thanks for reading.

This entry was posted Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 6:44 am and is filed under Unsorted early posts.  Print

2 Responses to “On vacation”

1. Keith says:

   June 1, 2006 at 2:08 pm

   No homework?

   Reply
2. Will says:

   June 7, 2006 at 3:15 am

   Have a nice trip!
   All the best,
   Will

   Reply

Welcome

This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.

   

 

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  "On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
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• Smorgasblog

  • Mark Doty
    And then, when they were done, I turned my head and saw, on a video screen, my own heart. It was golden, and pulsing, and resembled a cross between a Georgia O'Keefe flower and a jellyfish.
    ----

  • Dick Jones' Patteran Pages
    The painter washes his hands on the flannel of the sky
    Everything is in gouts of colour
    And the hats of the passing women are comets
    across the evening’s fire.
    ----

  • Parmanu
    But Hopper didn’t paint any snowy landscapes, did he? I wonder why. The loneliness and solitude of people in his cityscapes would, it seems to me, be accentuated in a street filled with snow. I can almost imagine the effect of streetlamp light bouncing off the snow, and the resulting shadows on nearby objects.
    ----

  • Mutating the Signature
    Don’t bring your tires
    stripped of hot rims, or used
    condoms, syringes or jumbo sized
    needles. Leave the headless
    doll in the truck, along with wrappers,
    giddy snack vestiges and Keystone
    cans.
    ----

  • the cassandra pages
    Her features rubbed with a wooden spoon,
    Fadwa's Damascene face emerges
    beneath my hands black with printing ink...
    ----

  • Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
    I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I'll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
    ----

  • everything feeds process
    In stories like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz or The Little Mermaid, the main character has to make sense of a world that is not her own. In my mind, this is an excellent metaphor for living as a grown-up in modern times.
    ----

  • slow reads
    This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
    ----

  • Coyote Mercury
    Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
    ----

  • The Middlewesterner
    Even the crow
    knows nothing

    except that hope
    is a kind of

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    ----

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All content by Dave Bonta at Via Negativa is available for reprint and remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.