National Poetry Month card #17

Posted on April 17, 2009 by Dave Bonta

National Poetry Month greeting card - Garrison Keillor

I’m doing one of these a day until the end of April. To send it, copy the permalink or the image file link into an email, tweet, Facebook DM, etc. — or just download and make free with the image.

About Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with one quadrillion of his closest microbial friends --- a tight-knit, symbiotic community comprising some 500 different species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa.
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11 Responses to National Poetry Month card #17

  1. Jarrett says:
    April 18, 2009 at 8:12 am

    This nicely reminds me, by the frisson of exception, how rarely you actually put anyone down :)

    • Dave says:
      April 18, 2009 at 8:42 am

      You’re right. I was in a foul mood yesterday, and hearing Keillor’s preachy Protestant “good poems” voice doing some lightweight piece-of-shit poem by Billy Collins did nothing to improve it.

  2. JMartin says:
    April 18, 2009 at 9:08 am

    Writer’s Almanac is but an Onion leg-pull with an unduly slow reveal.

  3. Joan says:
    April 18, 2009 at 2:04 pm

    Dave. Not so adroitly changing the subject from Keillor, who, indeed seems to be an Onion joke, I’d like you to satisfy my curiousity here?

    Who Is That Avatar?

    Though finding Bonta’s image
    Is plenty hard to do
    I’ve seen photos of elusive Dave
    This does not look like you.

    Not Emerson, or Whitman
    Not even Dave Thoreau
    I know I’ve seen that face before
    But are we meant to know?

    One can Google up a photo
    If one only has a name
    But one can’t reverse the process.
    It just doesn’t work the same.

    So unless this be state secret
    I would really like to know
    So I then can stop obsessing
    And get on with Bonta’s show.

    • Dave says:
      April 18, 2009 at 7:31 pm

      Bill asked the same question a couple weeks ago. I was a little surprised, actually: don’t all white guys with beards look alike? They do to me. But I don’t know who this fellow is. I snapped a photo of a photo in a little historical museum in the nearby town of Alexandria, PA, last fall. Since I was born in Alexandria, VA, this seemed somehow appropriate. I guess it’s one of their august founders. Some early 19th-century Scots-Irish cow-banger, no doubt.

      Thanks for the light verse, though. I love it!

  5. marly youmans says:
    April 19, 2009 at 12:35 pm

    Oops, I posted before I meant to post. Just came by to say that I’ll read the rest of your Clive poems after the children go back to school on Tuesday…

    Anyway, here is a second Keillor commentary: http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2006/04/dear-mr-keillor.html. Wonder what you’ll think of this one!

    • Dave says:
      April 19, 2009 at 3:40 pm

      Thanks for sharing those links, Marly — I’d forgotten about those posts. As I said in a comment at the second one, I’m not so much bothered by a blurring of the distinction between prose and poetry; that’s something I engage in often enough myself (daily, in fact). What bothers me in these examples, which I’d have to say are faily typical of Keillor’s “good poems,” are their failure to really challenge the reader — or, dare I say, their authors. They’re proffering a shallow and purely intellectual kind of insight that ultimately isn’t all that nourishing. The cure lies not in different or in better writing techniques but in better, more unmediated seeing and listening. I learned this from Mary Oliver, but the study of almost any gifted poet or artist would teach the same lesson, I think: that we progress as artists only to the extent that we learn to fine-tune the quality of our awareness.

  6. english says:
    April 20, 2009 at 10:32 pm

    hah! yes. that and his G.D. SINGING

    • Dave says:
      April 20, 2009 at 10:46 pm

      Well, yeah, but I hate to be too critical there, because if I had a radio show I’m pretty sure I’d sing goofy-ass song parodies on it too, and my voice isn’t half as good as his, even. I wouldn’t attempt hymns or duets, though.