I was never the wise child who, hearing a patter in the leaves, tilts his open-mouthed face toward the sky. I dreamed of powerful machines with banks of dials & buttons encased in gleaming alloys, beautiful & mysterious as cathedral windows. I practiced levitation by standing on one leg — it was better than nothing. Prophesy fascinated me because of the way it made otherwise clearly random lives appear significant. I learned two different ways to hypnotize chickens. What was merely a parlor trick at first turned into a new way to make them tractable prior to execution. Adulthood came slow as a summer evening in the far north.
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What’s up
The Manual series, when complete, will tell you everything you need to know that you didn't learn in kindergarten. Belgian video-artist and soundcreator Swoon is making videos for some of its sections. Guest-author Luisa A. Igloria has been writing a poem a day since November 2010 in response to Dave's posts at The Morning Porch. Yet another on-going collaboration is the dialogue in poems and photos prompted by late-night conversations between Dave and British blogger Rachel Rawlins, a project we call Conversari. Finally, the Words on the Street cartoon, featuring Dave's urban doppelganger Diogenes, returned at the beginning of 2012 as a weekly feature after a several-year hiatus.Categories
Series
- Bestiary
- Blogging the Appalachians
- Breakdown: The Banjo Poems
- Cibola
- Conversari
- 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
- Manual: How to make videopoems, courtesy of Swoon
- Landscape, with Geese; and Later, Falling Snow
- How to find things
- Lumen
- Words on the Street
- The Jewel in the Fruit
- How to breathe
- Preparing the Balikbayan Box
- How to wait
- Diorama, with Mountain City and Fog
- How to listen
- Legacy
- How to walk
- Maquette
- How to eat
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Recent Comments
- rr said This is the pig’s bollocks. (Aka awesome)
- Dave Bonta said Thanks. I’ve always loved that word (as well...
- Deb said Loving this series; want to steal many lines. Chee...
- Dave Bonta said Thanks! I kind of think my spring wildflower poems...
- Dave Bonta said Hi Albert – I’m glad you’re liki...
- Dick said Good to have both Words on the Street and the Manu...
- Albert B. Casuga said Correction: http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com/2012/...
Authors
Dave Bonta (3184), Luisa A. Igloria (424), 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)
Sigh! You show how it should be done. So much out of so little, like the perfect sleight of hand.
Your words have so much of experience tucked in.Evokes very similar feelings in me as the ones evinced here, like some thoughts forgotten somewhere, sometime.
opening lines of a novel I really want to read…
I see my own history in this, my own life’s CV. Wonderful, Dave.
I love how those last two sentences work together.
Thanks, everyone — glad you liked this. Sorry I’m not posting more often lately, but my brain doesn’t work as well in the summer.