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Authors
Dave Bonta (3180), Luisa A. Igloria (421), Todd Davis (9), Teju Cole (5), Steven Bonta (3), Chris Bolgiano (3), Marcia Bonta (2), Bruce Bonta (1), Abdul-Walid of Acerbia (1), Sarah Bennett (1), Nathan Moore (1), Kristin Berkey-Abbott (1), Joan Ryan (1), Alexis Aguilar (1), Peter Stephens (1), Alison Kent (1), Dick Jones (1)Categories
Series
- Bestiary
- Blogging the Appalachians
- Breakdown: The Banjo Poems
- Cibola
- Highgate Cemetery Poems
- Honduran poetry
- Manual
- Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11
- Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011
- Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011
- Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011
- Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2011-12
- Odes to Tools
- Poetics and technology
- Postcards from a Conquistador
- Public Poems
- Ridge and Valley
- Self Portraits
- The Temptations of Solitude
- Wildflower poems
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Recent Posts
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Recent Comments
- Kristin Berkey-Abbott said I am loving the whole series, but this one entry i...
- Dale Favier said done
- Dale Favier said I read a couple of these to Martha, just before we...
- Dave Bonta said Well, presuming your infrared-sensing pits are on...
- Natalie said I especially like “..coil into a spring.....
- Luisa A. Igloria said Thank you, Rachel! xo
- Rachel Barenblat said This is stunning, Luisa. Thank you.
The other day I had an epiphany (ugh, did I actually say that?) about Daniel Boone et al. How they “discovered” a land, Kentucky, where living was easy and turned it into a land where living is hard. Something to celebrate, huh?
And Boone grew up in Pennsylvania, too. The archetypal frontiersman in many ways. Not the exact analogue of a conquistador, of course – in Western PA, that would be more the land speculators, I suppose. Guys like George Washington.
But yeah, the original forest was something of a cornucopia, with game, medicines and mast in quantities we can barely begin to imagine.
Something quite obscene about that stump of tree.
Interesting series.
Have a good holiday, Dave.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how powerful, and powerfully oppressive, the counter-eden myth of our origins is — the idea that in the stone age we lived in scarcity, leading miserable lives. The little I’ve read suggests that there’s no reason to think that true, that actually most of us lived where there was plenty of good hunting & gathering, and we probably made our livings on a few hours’ work a day.
If you’re trying to keep people happily (or anyway not rebelliously) working sixty hour weeks, you’re not going to want that sort of information to get around.
Lucy – You too. Glad you’re enjoying this series.
dale – Yes indeed. My reading of the anthropological literature has played a very large role in my political thinking – which is not to say that I romanticize indigenous societies, of course.
Here the Europeans wipe out the Indians with both war and small pox and then later wipe out the passenger pigeons that ‘darkened the skys’.
This is a fascinating concept for a series. The disgruntled thoughts of a European ‘soldier’ fish out of water, so unable to appreciate our native people or the native natural beauty of the land. Still, I thought they had landed a bit farther south. Perhaps I should have stayed awake in Jr. Hi American History.
Joan – I’m glad you’re liking the series. I had intended “conquistador” to be kind of a multivalent image, allowing anachronisms both historic and geographic. I want to consider the conquest as an ongoing process spanning half a millennium.