Via Negativa

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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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• Via Negativa’s first book-spawn!

  
  Order from the publisher or
  Contact me for a signed copy

• Recent Posts

  • Woodrat Podcast 5: Amplified Bards
  • Glyphs
  • Snow forest
  • What this isn’t
  • The Banjo Project
  • Medicine Show (3)
  • Groundhog vs. groundhog
  • Woodrat Podcast 4: Banjo Jam
  • Luck
  • Perigee
  • Winter trees in a flood
  • Housekeeping note
  • Odes to Tools now in print
  • Banjo Origins: The Pleistocene
  • Woodrat Podcast 3: Embodied Miracles

• Recent Comments

  • Dave on Woodrat Podcast 5: Amplified Bards
  • Dave on Snow forest
  • Dave on Snow forest
  • Dave on Snow forest
  • James on Woodrat Podcast 5: Amplified Bards
  • Susan Donnelly on Snow forest
  • herhimnbryn on Snow forest
  • Jeanne on Snow forest
  • Dave on Glyphs
  • JJS on Glyphs

• Best of Via Negativa

  • Exodus
  • What it was like
  • Out back at the all-night diner
  • Milk teeth
  • Whatever you do, don't eat the rosebush
  • First draft, best draft
  • Bad maxims
  • Swarm
  • Knots
  • Out of place?
• A random selection of greatest hits. Reload the page to see more.

• Archives

  Select Month February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003

• Series

  Banjo Poems
  The Tempations of Solitude
  Poetics and Technology
  Honduran poetry
  Ridge and Valley: an exchange of poems
  Postcards from a Conquistador
  Public Poems
  Odes to Tools
  Peckerwood Pilgrim
  Blogging the Appalachians
  Self-Portraits
  Cibola (epic poem)
  

• My other projects on the web

  Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit
  Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded
  Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters
  Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond
  The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning
  Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop"
  Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems
  Spoil, an online collection of my older poems

  (For a complete listing, see my Google profile)

•  

  "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."
  — Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.

   

  

• Smorgasblog

  • not native fruit
    i find them inspiring because they represent ordinary working-class people expressing their spiritual creativity in a free and exuberant manner. these folks allow their spirit and zest for living to spill out creatively filling space and air with color and sound. against the backdrop of an often grim and always gritty-gray environment they project an alternative.
    ----

  • Somewhere in NJ
    Owls are the stuff of imagination. Seeing these keepers of shadow requires exploring the edges of light... if one fails at it, the fault lies not in the seeing, but instead with one's way of looking.
    ----

  • Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
    Sometimes the cold was such that I sat with my feet in newspaper-stuffed cardboard boxes to stop my toes from freezing. So there was rigour and hardship of a kind, which is what I wanted. I think perhaps over-idealising solitude might be a failing of creative people.
    ----

  • Velveteen Rabbi
    The sadness arises
    again
    and cuts my legs
    out from under me

    the monotony
    of trying to soothe
    screams as frequent
    as the waves...
    ----

  • Small Change
    Camille Claudel hugs the marble child
    she made, while Rodin lectures her

    on the tyranny of feelings.
    ----

  • slow reads
    I wave at black windows as the orange bus sets. My son, where do you sit? Do you see? look?
    ----

  • Crackskull Bob
    One good thing about drawing snow scenes is you can leave a lot of space blank. Artists are basically lazy, or else you'd find us working down to the Ford plant or whatnot. Instead of losing appendages in machinery or listening to assholes say "How's that report coming, Taylor?" we get to sit around playing with paints, a skill we pretty much mastered in kindergarten.
    ----

  • Journey to the Center
    Some names were as familiar as my own — Argiope aurantia, Anatis mali, Erythemis simplicicollis…. well, there were dozens and dozens of them. In the weeks after we began our fight with cancer, those names would gradually be replaced by the names of chemo agents, bones requiring radiation treatments, drugs available under clinical trials, and so on. Gradually, over time, it was as though some strange cloud of selective amnesia descended upon me.
    ----

  • Creature of the Shade
    One of the most basic pleasures of the Australian landscape, to me, is the complex sensation of being watched by a kangaroo.
    ----

  • Coyote Crossing
    Longing and terror are both of them valid responses to the immensity of this landscape. It seems a shame to me that there are people who have never seen a thing like this, who have never once been out of sight of civilization’s scars upon the earth. Those are the only places I feel whole. What kind of truncated life it must be, to have all your skies dissected by overhead wires, all your earth parceled out in neat lots.
    ----

• Read more (Archives)

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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.