I live in an Appalachian hollow in the Juniata watershed of central Pennsylvania, and spend a great deal of time walking in the woods. Here's a bio. All of my writing here is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For attribution in printed material, my name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact me for permission to waive the "share alike" provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).
The stone idols of our ancestors
lie face-down across the graves
they were made to watch over.
Lips worn whistle-thin
by the corrosive breath of engines
seek relief in the soil, where perhaps
the live wires of nematodes
might revive them, or ivy cover them
with feathers that actually move.
Only a few feet down the crowd awaits,
growing more anonymous by the year.
Perhaps they can reach those winter trees
through dissolution, like stalactites.
They shape the darkness
in their own image: a mask of dirt,
a vessel, a full breast.
Fiona Robyn and Kaspalita on the waterfront at Aberystwyth, Wales
Brew yourself a nice cuppa and join Fiona Robyn, Kaspalita and me for a conversation about writing, religion, spirituality, science, small stones and more. We met on May 7 in Aberystwyth, Wales; Fiona and Kaspa subsequetly tied the knot on June 18th, and starting on July 1 they will again curate a month-long river of stones, with contributions from around the world.
Fiona Robyn is a novelist, a blogger, a therapist, and a creativity coach. She is very fond of Earl Grey tea and homemade cake. Kaspalita is a Pure Land Buddhist priest, a sometime blogger and is still learning to play the ukulele. Together they are on a mission, they say, to help people connect with the world through writing. In addition to the river of stones (see the aggregator blog) they also host the Writing Our Way Home forum and run e-courses on writing, spirituality and connecting to the world. Fiona has even written an e-book, available as a free download, called How to Write Your Way Home.
Write from a place of deep fear, which the authors of the Old Testament rightly considered the beginning of wisdom. Turn your poems into cunning traps and instruments of fraud. Writer’s block is primordial and best left uncarved; create only in its shadow.
Prize your digressions. Revise nothing, and put all your poems into books that self-destruct after a single reading. Wallow in idleness. Treat inspiration as a sworn enemy.
Practice abstinence; it’s the only way to know what love and hunger are really all about. Find something absurd to believe in and cling to it as passionately as Pound clung to fascism or Neruda to Stalinism. Watch a lot of television.
“First thought, best thought”: get it down and go do something useful, like cleaning the toilet. In lieu of reading, listen to audiobooks. Write about what you don’t know and didn’t think you cared about. Stay in your cave until you start seeing beasts on the walls.
Cultivate suspicion and distrust toward the universe — after all, it is out to kill you. If you must be sociable, avoid poets, for they are boring at best and petty at worst. Hang out with artists and musicians instead.
I realized this morning that my most recent videopoem was my 100th upload to Vimeo, so in celebration I created a new album for my videopoems there. It contains 45 videos so far, including those I’ve made for poems by others (Nic S., Dick Jones, Peter Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pedro Salinas, Czeslaw Milosz, Cesar Vallejo and Juan Ramon Jimenez). The Flash player at the head of this post (probably not visible to RSS or email subscribers) displays everything in the album in reverse chronological order. Once you start viewing videos, it will continue playing them in order unless you click on something, which allows you to resume browsing. (If it starts giving error messages, refresh the page.) I’ve also stuck this player at the top of the Videopoetry category page here, since I do store almost all my videopoems on Vimeo.
Vimeo calls this a Hubnut widget, and says it offers “a TV-style viewing experience.” I guess being able to change videos with one click of the mouse is kind of like changing channels with a remote, assuming there’s someplace with 45 channels devoted to poetry.
Speaking of channels, I do still also maintain the amazing Undiscovery Channel for wildlife videos, though many of my best are actually hosted at YouTube. (Since until recently I didn’t have a paid account at Vimeo, it was faster to get videos processed at YouTube, and like most bloggers I’m often in a hurry to post. I still think YouTube is a great free service and an indispensible website, albeit increasingly junked-up with ads.)
As time permits I’ll be making and uploading higher-definition versions of some of my older videos, and maybe even fixing some problems with soundtracks, sub-par readings and the like. One of Vimeo’s chief virtues is that it allows one to swap in a new file for an old one while keeping the same URL and embed code, and without losing accumulated statistics, comments and likes. And see, this is why I prefer the freemium model for web services: once I’ve committed to paying $60 a year for something, it makes me want to get my money’s worth and stop being so goddamned slap-dash about everything.
Six fresh oranges
in the short grass
on the grave of the founder
of an import/export company,
born in Aleppo.
A toddler strains against
his mother’s grip: Ball!
How to explain
the Silk
Road, the souk,
the once-unassailable
hospitality of merchants?
How to explain torture,
a feast of agonies called
the magic carpet?
A cricket plays his hit single. Ball. Ball.
Such longing!
In Syria, they say
a narrow spot can contain
a thousand friends.
I’ve shared videos of the May 6 poetry reading for The Book of Ystwyth, but the main event was the opening of Clive’s 60th birthday career retrospective exhibition at the National Library of Wales the following afternoon. And fortunately I didn’t have to worry about videoing that one; they had a professional filmmaker there to do it for them. This is the result.
Following Andrew Green’s introduction, Clive’s own remarks focus on the central role of place, love and community in his work:
Being a painter isn’t just about standing in the studio and making still lives and landscapes and narrative paintings. It’s about the people you surround yourself with, people who cluster around you, the people you love.
Would that all gifted artists and writers took their social obligations so seriously.
See yesterday’s post for the text. And where did the poem come from? As I explained in the comments yesterday, I went to a multi-day bluegrass festival with my banjo-playing cousin and his family this past weekend. That’s the origin of most of the video footage. The first two sentences that I ascribe to the banjo player are in fact pretty close to what I overheard in a workshop for banjo players on Saturday. But I wrote the opening lines in response to footage of a beetle on a blade of grass, shot yesterday morning in front of my garden. So the video and the poem came along together.
I’m more of a fan of older-style Appalachian string band music, but I do enjoy bluegrass, too, when I’m in the mood. Its relentless pursuit of speed combined with its potent nostalgia for a simpler way of life strike me as quintessentially American, though I realize it’s spread all over the world now.
A road travelled every day
soon comes unhitched from the horizon. You can switch roads or you can dance in place.
The fiddle player says:
I like to stare out the car window
& dream about staying put & growing roots. You can dance in place or you can jam.
The banjo player says:
I never learn the tune as a whole, only its parts.
I remember the one little thing that’s different
& the rest takes care of itself. You just keep jamming until something jells.
In this cemetery, the English ivy does all the work of grief, circling, knotting, twisting, persistent as a scavenger. It listens, a crowd of one, hanging on every engraved word. As vines reach the sky, their five-lobed leaves give way to a simpler shape, a sort of teardrop, & the umbels drip nectar. The fact that the berries are poisonous to humans is incidental, I’m sure, & the plant can’t help how invasive it’s become overseas, pulling down natives with no natural defenses against such clinging. Bindwood, they call it here. Lovestone. Grief’s greenest eraser, wearing holes in every last will & testament & scrawling in the breach its own cursive signature.
