One with the head of a crocodile, one wearing the fresh skin of a newborn just beginning to lose its glow, one in a trench coat and shoes black and shiny enough to confuse the moon into setting an hour early, one who sniffs and shuffles papers, one with the wings of small bats neatly folded into the clean and green coffin of his pocket, one who claps loudly at inappropriate junctures, one with an extruded plastic handshake and a business card printed with the wrong email, one who seeks absolution in the polite smiles of his opponents the birdwatchers and trout fishermen, one who used to be the most powerful senator in the state and now turns his back on the public hearing — the assembled citizenry with their ignorant concerns — to bark into a clam shell too narrow for the sound of surf.
I have a real post coming, honest! But in the meantime, I have to share a couple of the web goodies I’ve come across in the last few days.
I and the Bird #133 is a treasure-trove of extended literary quotes, mostly from poems. You almost don’t have to click the links (though of course you should.) The host this time is Matthew Sarver, a fellow Western Pennsylvanian with serious naturalist chops and a gift for writing and photography. He’s still in his first year of blogging, but he seems to have taken to it like a duck to water. I and the Bird, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is a hugely successful, bi-weekly blog carnival about birds and birding — our original inspiration at the Festival of the Trees.
Matt’s one of many birdwatchers on Twitter now — the medium seems like a great fit for birders, and not just because of the avian iconography — and it was on Twitter that I caught the news about Matt’s edition of IATB as I was doing a quick check through the five accounts I maintain there. Yes, five, and I neglect than all! But I’m primarily still focused on Twitter (and Identi.ca) as a medium for micropoetry.
Back when I first started tweeting my Morning Porch entries in November 2007, one of the relatively few Twitterers then sharing haiku was @tinywords, the feed for a daily haiku site with quite a few followers. Then it fell silent in July 2008. Well, just last week I noticed a tweet from @tinywords announcing that tiny words the website was going to start back up, and I clicked through to find a brand new site. And this time, the editor has broadened the focus:
tinywords is now accepting submissions for issue #1. This issue will be edited by tinywords publisher d. f. tweney and will be published, one poem per day, starting December 1.
I’m looking for very short or micro poems of no more than 5 lines, and ideally less than 140 characters. This could include haiku, senryu, tanka, cinquains, or other forms.
Longer works (e.g. haibun) will also be considered if they include a very short poem that can be excerpted.
I’m also interested in artwork and/or poem-artwork combinations (e.g. haiga) that could fit with the theme of miniature poetry.
I’ll accept submissions for a 2-week period only, from November 10-24.
It’s great to see new venues for micropoetry popping up. Tiny words joins Fiona Robyn’s A Handful of Stones and the group blog I contribute to, Open Micro. There’s also an entirely Twitter-based microjournal called Seven By Twenty. And there are quite a few individual purveyors of micropoetry on Twitter these days.
Now, it’s easy to dismiss this efflorescence of short-form verse on the web as pandering to the fractured attention spans endemic to a distraction-rich media environment. There may be some truth to that. But my idea with the Morning Porch was always to try to make people stop for a moment and go “Huh,” and to the extent that I’ve succeeded there — and led others to begin using Twitter and Identi.ca for similar purposes — I count it a success. More than that, poets have been writing various forms of micropoetry for centuries, and why? Because it turns out to be an exceptionally good way to focus the attention. What words are really necessary? What dazzling metaphor has to remain implicit if we are to capture the whole mood? I love the way my Twitter-inspired microprose-poetry discipline forces me to grapple with these questions every morning.
What are you listening for, who
already know everything I have
to say? You are nothing but
a tourist of the night.
What appears empty to you
is in fact a fully inhabited tenement.
Your inscrutable fruit is far
more pungent than you can know,
who do not risk becoming
someone else’s morsel.
Who cooks for you?
*
Response to last night’s post. (In bird guides, the barred owl’s call is usually described as sounding like “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?”)
My brother had chanted its name for days
until, voilà, it hung
a hundred feet above our astonished faces:
lammergeier, impossible to miss,
the open book of its body so wide
it could be read by the thinnest updrafts,
dark against the clouds —
& us standing by the very rock
that Roland’s sword was said to have split
when he fought the Basques & prepared
a feast for vultures. But this one
with its fully feathered head
& wisp of beard looked nothing like
one of those tonsured carrion-eaters.
We lamented its empty talons,
having fed ourselves on tales
of an expert locksmith
taking the bones one by one up
into the sky & letting them drop
onto some likely rock, there to glean
from the splinters the wine-red
marrow, mother of blood.
We watched it pivot,
rocking in the high wind,
then slide quick as a sword down
that long & boney ridge.
Click on the image to read the other posts in honor of International Vulture Awareness Day and learn why vulture conservation is so vital. Sentence-of-the-day award goes to Charlie at 10,000 Birds:
On the face of it, all this attention for a group of scavenging birds that are fairly universally seen as ugly, quarrelsome, and unkempt, dark reminders of mortality, and definitely not the sort of guests you’d invite to a dinner-party (“We sent the invitations out Mrs Vulture, I know we did — it must just be coincidence that both you and the Hyenas didn’t receive them…”) must seem a little odd (especially to any non-birder who stumbles across IVAD and who had probably assumed that we birders usually celebrate delicacy, beauty or song rather than excrement-coated bags of feathers who spend much of their day with their heads shoved up a rotting corpse).
Rusty only in the fall;
usually suggests a short-tailed Grackle.
Male, spring: A robin-sized blackbird
with a pale yellow eye.
Note, a loud chack.
“Song,” a split creak like a rusty hinge.
River groves, wooded swamps, muskeg.
2. Scissor-tailed Flycatcher Muscivora forvicata
A beautiful bird; pale pearly gray,
with an extremely long scissor-like tail,
usually folded.
Sides and wing linings salmon-pink.
The young bird with a short tail
may suggest Western Kingbird.
Voice: A harsh keck or kew;
a repeated ka-leep;
also shrill kingbirdlike
bickerings and stutterings.
Habitat: Semi-open country,
ranches, farms,
roadsides,
wires.
3. Sanderling Calidris alba
A plump active sandpiper of the outer beaches,
where it chases the retreating waves
like a clockwork toy.
Summer plumage: Bright rusty
about the head, back, and breast.
Winter plumage: The palest sandpiper;
snowy white below, pale gray above
with black shoulders.
4. Black Skimmer Rhynchops niger
Black above and white below; more slender than a gull,
with extremely long wings.
The bright red bill (tipped with black) is long
and flat vertically; the lower mandible juts
a third beyond the upper.
This coastal species skims low,
dipping its knifelike mandible in the water.
Voice: Soft, short, barking noises.
Also kaup, kaup.
5. Whip-poor-will Caprimulgus vociferus
A voice in the night woods.
When flushed by day, the bird flits away
on rounded wings like a large brown moth.
Male shows large white tail patches;
in female these are buffish.
Voice: At night, a rolling,
tiresomely repeated whip’ poor-weel’,
or purple-rib, etc.;
accent on first and last syllables.
6. Black Rail Laterallus jamaicensis
A tiny blackish rail with a small black bill;
about the size of a bobtailed young sparrow.
Nape deep chestnut.
Very difficult to glimpse, but may be flushed
by dragging a rope over the marsh.
Field guides are reference books, written to be skimmed. Since the books must be portable, the prose is economical in the extreme. But forced concision can lead to inadvertent poetry, as I think these examples show. (This is another post that began on the Found Poetry forum at Read Write Poem.)
Photo by nimrodcooper (click through to read the fascinating, eerie story behind the picture)
Found poem consisting of excerpts from an article in the Pennsylvania
Game News, June 2009, by James J. Corsetti Jr.
Hunting crows is somewhat of a relic from the past.
Old-times would cruise around the backroads
With a rifle behind the seat
And take out any crows they came across.
Folks would use the .22 Hornet, .220 Swift, .22-250,
And many others to take crows at 100 to 300 yards
Taking a target smaller than your fist.
I don’t know of anyone these days who uses
A rifle for crows.
Crow hunting here is a shotgun game.
Crows can be quite fast
And can spin on a dime in the air
And put themselves out of range in a hurry.
Use either a modified or full choke.
These birds rarely come in real close like doves or ducks,
So you need to reach out and touch them.
One time they kept flying back and forth
Over my stand despite being shot at,
They kept coming back.
I use dead crows as decoys, which works well.
I place the dead crows in trees or in the open.
I have done well with my mouth crow calls,
And no calls sound the same.
I can react to their calling
And be as aggressive as possible
Or a little coy.
It is one of the few animals
You can hunt on Sundays.
No one I know has ever eaten them.
I have used their feathers for fly tying,
I have used them for my trapline.
I breast them out like I do my doves
And use them for bait.
This winter, when you’re sitting next to the fireplace,
Bored out of your mind, think of crows.
Assembled for the Found Poetry group forum at Read Write Poem. I believe this creative re-purposing qualifies as Fair Use under U.S. copyright law. The photo is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.
What made the stork ancestor of New World vultures forsake its obstretrics practice for the morgue?
Where does the wood thrush store its silver bells when it flies south for the winter?
Did the old trout learn how to lurk from studying ospreys?
Is it the excess of sky following a clearcut that gives cerulean warblers the blues?
If jewelweeds were never ensorceled by a hummingbird’s wand, would they still turn into touch-me-nots?
How many swallows does it take to make a summer?
Do winter wrens come back from the dead to haunt the enemies of clutter?
When a flock of grackles pivots around a hawk, are they trying to drive it mad?
Why do goldfinches go to all the trouble of building watertight nests if they never go boating?
What does a 25-pound wild turkey know about flying that a 3-pound chicken does not?
Would bitterns burp as loudly if they didn’t swallow frogs?
How do we know the loopy displays of male woodcocks aren’t aimed at the earthworms?
Does the cardinal attacking his reflection in the window learn to hate the color red?
Is the drumming grouse testing the air for ripeness, the way we thump melons?
What does the scarlet tanager see in our boring northern forests to justify an annual fight all the way from South America?
How many paper girls will it take to save the Japanese crane?
*
Two of my favorite books by Pablo Neruda are The Art of Birds and The Book of Questions. I wanted to try and write something in the style of both. I’ve crossposted a hyperlinked version to The Clade.
Not too many folks online today, but for those who do happen by, here’s a little video I shot on Friday and today. For some reason, the first brown thrasher to return to the hollow often really likes singing from the top of a small, nondescript walnut tree that pokes out of the barberry hedge next to the shed.
As I’ve mentioned here in the past, brown thrashers are close relatives to mockingbirds and catbirds, and like their cousins, go in for extreme vocal improvisation. The thrasher can be easily distinguished from the others, however, by its tendency to repeat almost every phrase. I like to think of it as a compulsive rhymer.
One of the greatest things about being a blogger — aside from the fame and riches — is that sometimes people send me handmade things in the mail. Now and then someone sends me a book, too. Last week I got both in one package: Ten Poems About Highways and Birds, a new chapbook by Via Negativa reader Sarah Bennett. It’s definitely handmade: she told me she taught herself how to silkscreen just so she could do the covers, and the book appears to have been stitched on a sewing machine. It has a great kitchen-table vibe.
Sarah is blogless, so far as I know, and I first “met” her a year ago, when she began leaving comments on some of my tool odes. She emailed a poem that she’d written in response, “Advice to a Nail” (follow the link for a brief bio as well). Then a couple of weeks ago she’d emailed me to say she’d made this chapbook, and would like to send me a copy in return for all my blogging. Sure, I said. I don’t think she had any expectation that I would review it here, and in fact I had to write back for ordering info (see below) once I discovered that the book was, in fact, excellent. So the following is completely unsolicited, albeit influenced by our online friendship.
“Ten Poems About Highways and Birds” is a very unprepossessing title, I’ll admit, and ten poems may not seem like very much — there’s a lot of whitespace in this chapbook. But birds are, among other things, almost universal symbols of aspiration and beauty, and as for highways: they are perhaps the most inescapable and enduring expression of Americans’ passionate monologue with the land. I mean, obviously this isn’t the only nation with highways; it just happens to be one of the few modern nations where even the most fervent of conservationists is still at the mercy of the road system for basic transport. I am acutely aware of this myself since I don’t own a car. (Which can make it tricky to get to Audubon board meetings, as I’ll be doing tonight.)
All ten of the poems are indeed about either highways or birds, and many are about both. Bennett hails from eastern Massachusetts, and she told me that she used to have a long commute, and would often compose poems in her head and jot them down when she got to work, “a la Wallace Stevens (without the secretary).” In that respect, this book reminds me a little of Tom Montag’s distillation of poems from his Morning Drive Journal, The Sweet Bite of Morning, a somewhat longer chapbook published by Juniper Press in 2003. Where Montag is spare and often aphoristic, though, Bennett’s poems are each about a page long, and often pack considerable emotional punch.
In the opening poem, “Early Morning on Route 128,” vehicles and wildlife are seen to share a common destiny:
Crows commute, heads down,
their line of black Fords slow
but steady. A heron keeps his Bentley in low gear.
Are we talking about birds or people here? Bennett never tips her hand.
A page later, our attention is drawn to a “beautifully named” invader of the continent.
The flank of a very large animal occasionally
flexes above me, her curves
revealed as flocks of starling.
Some of the poems tackle more personal subjects. In “Eastbound on the Mass Pike,” Bennett and an unnamed companion are having a fight as they drive, and it’s all she can do to avoid “open[ing] the door / at 75 miles per hour” and bailing out.
Above us one large hawk
and another spin round each other, connected
by a quarter mile of nothing.
Roadkill is of course an unavoidable subject, mentioned in one poem and dealt with head-on in another. But I was even more impressed with the way Bennett relates driving to flying, as in “Aloft,” where a fragment of memory about a blackbird falling out of the sky is interwoven with a story about her mother being afraid that she would forget how to play the organ until she got to church, and the narrator herself confessing that driving was always like that for her — and that in some way it helped her to remember how to be human.
More than anything, I guess, that’s what I like about this book: it’s full of ambiguities. “Love Poem for a Barred Owl,” for example, might really be nothing more or less than that. For a reader with any knowledge of the environmental consequences of sprawl or the big-woods requirements of barred owls, the poem cannot fail to awaken longing and wistfulness.
You should not be
here. The dark fields you fly
over are filled with new
cellar holes and the forest is only trees
in peoples’ back yards.
But when the call recedes into the distance, even readers who know nothing about habitat loss would be forgiven for thinking that something more than fields have been hollowed out and filled with darkness.
My favorite poem in the book involves not birds but earth-bound wildlife instructing each other “On Crossing the Highway.”
Go at night.
It is easier
at night. They give off a light of
warning and
your feet won’t burn.
I particularly like the description of the median strip: “a tiny field full of / wind and roaring.”
The book ends as mysteriously as it began, with a poem involving “of all things a bluebird / in January.” I can’t really quote any more, because, as so often with understated poetry, you have to have read and absorbed the poems that precede it to fully appreciate its impact. As I’ve been typing this review, I’ve been watching of all things a snow squall in April, and thinking that anyone who pays attention to the natural world will have to become much more conversant with anachronisms and strange bedfellows in the years to come. Ten Poems About Highways and Birds is a great place to start.
Ordering info
Sarah writes:
The book costs $6.00, plus $1.00 for postage (I went to the post office today and checked, finally). People can send me a check for $7.00.
Sarah Bennett
47 Sampson Avenue
Swampscott, MA 01907
Or they can email me shbennett5[at]gmail[dot]com for more info.
Last night around 11:30, after posting “The Grave Dug By Beasts,” I went out for a quick, half-hour walk. The crescent moon was setting over Sapsucker Ridge as I made my way slowly up the field toward the head of the hollow.
Just past the top of the amphitheatre, I’m startled by an explosive snort from thirty feet away: white-tailed deer. We haven’t been seeing deer during daylight hours nearly as much as we usually do this time of year, and when we do they seem unduly skittish. My mother wonders if perhaps the local coyotes haven’t begun behaving more like wolves, traveling in packs and targeting healthy, adult deer. I’d love for that to be true — the ecological repercussions of such a switch would be enormous — but I’m wary of wishful thinking.
A little farther along, I hear more running sounds to my right. Five or six deer cross the trail right in front of me, all in a panic. They’re not running from me, I realize, but from something else. I wait for half a minute, but I don’t hear anything further, so I move on.
It’s a chilly night, and I’m walking quickly to try and get my blood moving. I stand for a few seconds to catch my breath at the top of the field, the spruce grove looming up in front of me — a black wall. Just then, a weird, strangled cry rings out. Fox? Coyote? Bobcat? It’s right on the other side of the grove, whatever it is, and I wonder if my presence has set it off, because the cries keep coming every few seconds, accompanied by the sound of slow, erratic footsteps in the dry grass. I feel the hair rising on the back of my neck. It was exactly one year ago that we had to shoot that rabid gray fox.
It suddenly seems like a good idea to make my way back to the house before the moon sets. I ease over into the woods as quietly as I can and pad quickly down Laurel Ridge Trail. The cries slowly fade from earshot.
*
Twelve hours later, Mom returns from her morning walk with some exciting news: she’s found the Cooper’s hawk nest in the woods on Laurel Ridge, less than 200 yards from the houses. Since I’ve been hearing the birds (and very occasionally glimpsing them) from my front porch since early March, it’s no great surprise that they’re nesting up there. But it’s great that she’s found the nest, and that it’s far enough down from the top of the ridge that we should be able to find a spot where we can set up a spotting scope later on, look down into it, and watch the chicks, as we did back in 2003 with another Cooper’s hawk nest — provided that this is the nest they end up using, and not an alternate.
I go up the trail following Mom’s directions with cameras at the ready. It’s a bright sunny morning, and the temperature is climbing into the high 40s. There are several squirrel nests that seem almost big enough and stick-filled enough to be hawk nests, but when I get to the real thing, there’s really no comparison. It doesn’t have any leaves in it, which suggests a more recent origin. And it’s a more imposing structure, with higher sides and more of a disc shape — clearly something only a bird could build.
At scattered intervals, I hear one of the hawks chattering from nearby. First it’s off to one side, then the other. The trees are completely bare, I can see for hundreds of feet through the canopy, and I am standing still and watching as intently as I can, but the bird might as well be invisible. Just as soon as I think I’ve finally zeroed in on the spot, I hear the kak-kak-kak-kak-kak from somewhere else. There! Was that a flicker of gray-brown wings? Nope. It’s behind me now.
Here it is almost noon, and I’m getting spooked again. It’s uncanny how good some predators are at staying just out of sight — if never completely out of mind.
The last two days out on the bay I observe
the tundra swans leaving the flat horizon
of this water, arcing over tidal pools
and the inescapable prairies of marsh grass.
You are on your mountain to the north, closer
to their calls as they wing their way away
from this estuary that saves them each winter.
After so many months of shifting land, of rising
and falling tides, their heavy bodies must ache
for a release, a reprieve to our comings and goings,
whether by boat or air or, oddest of all, by car,
which looks nothing like the way these birds travel.
It’s the unyielding tundra where they will give
themselves over to their own desires. I suppose
most of us need the solid earth beneath our feet
as we choose a mate. The undulating waters
of our hearts make it hard enough to remember
which flyway to follow, let alone how to spend
those transitory days in the half-light of summer
brooding over what we’ve made between us.
I was taking the broom for a slow shuffle
around the dining room when I heard
the fluting of wild swans & rushed out,
scanning the sky till I spotted the long wedge
high above the hollow, heading north.
They were as dark against the sky
as we must be to them against the ground,
pausing in our Sunday labors, mouths open
as the swans pass over the train tracks
& the river, over the interstate & the quarry’s
enormous silent megaphone,
over a cardinal singing in a barberry hedge,
over junker cars & houses sheathed
in fading asphalt shingles,
over old carpets left out in the yard
to kill the grass where a vegetable garden will go,
over the burrows of amorous woodchucks
and the leaf nests of squirrels,
over sheets & long johns flapping on the line.
The swans seemed tireless. Their one refrain
might as well have been “Over the Hills
& Far Away,” as in the Burl Ives song
about the piper’s son. They’d keep it up
long past the last tree, I knew — until
the land cleared of almost all clutter,
there where the darkness disappears for months.
I went back to my sweeping,
assembled the dust from every corner,
then opened the door & ushered
that small blue hill into the wind.
I also shot a mediocre video of a flock of tundra swans this morning. You can watch it here.
One finch doesn’t
fly with the others,
his eyes clouded
over. Whatever
panics the others
never shakes him,
gripping the perch
he had struggled
to find, flying by
sound, by shadows,
by the sudden wind
from fifty wings
leaving him alone
at the round
house of a feeder,
pulling gray sun-
flower seeds
from under
its doors.
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 or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.
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
"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
Dick Jones' Patteran Pages
The painter washes his hands on the flannel of the sky
Everything is in gouts of colour
And the hats of the passing women are comets
across the evening’s fire.
----
Parmanu
But Hopper didn’t paint any snowy landscapes, did he? I wonder why. The loneliness and solitude of people in his cityscapes would, it seems to me, be accentuated in a street filled with snow. I can almost imagine the effect of streetlamp light bouncing off the snow, and the resulting shadows on nearby objects.
----
Mutating the Signature
Don’t bring your tires
stripped of hot rims, or used
condoms, syringes or jumbo sized
needles. Leave the headless
doll in the truck, along with wrappers,
giddy snack vestiges and Keystone
cans.
----
the cassandra pages
Her features rubbed with a wooden spoon,
Fadwa's Damascene face emerges
beneath my hands black with printing ink...
----
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I'll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
----
everything feeds process
In stories like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz or The Little Mermaid, the main character has to make sense of a world that is not her own. In my mind, this is an excellent metaphor for living as a grown-up in modern times.
----
slow reads
This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
----
Coyote Mercury
Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
----
Heraclitean Fire
And while zebra finches aren’t exactly imbued with an enormous amount of dignity at the best of times, there was something slightly off-putting about seeing these little birds with their own aims and desires in life being cajoled into being art.
----
