Category Archives: Plummer’s Hollow

Where I live. See also the Plummer’s Hollow website.

Haiku for 10/10/10

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Dave Bonta


Direct link to video on Vimeo.

10/10/10 is variously Binary Day and 42 Day among geeks and Douglas Adams fans; a Global Day of Doing for greens; a day to try and record the world in photos and videos on Flickr; and among birders, the annual, international Big Sit bird count. For me, it was just a day to walk in the woods.

I approach videohaiku a little differently from regular videopoetry, as you’ll see. For one thing, I prefer the poem to appear as type, without audio. Also, the text can flow more directly from the imagery than with a regular videopoem. And finally, while some videohaiku makers use three short scenes in imitation of the three-line pattern that characterizes most English-language haiku, I prefer the style I’ve followed here: holding the poem until the end of a quiet, meditative scene or two. This resembles the effect of a poem on a scroll, or a haiku following a passage of prose (haibun).

I might get a second videopoem, haiku or otherwise, out of footage I shot today, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Posted in Plummer's Hollow, Trees, Video, Videopoetry | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Genesis

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 22 of 40 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

The oaks have
dropped more acorns
this year than anyone
can remember. It’s
like walking on ball
bearings, except
sometimes they pop:
a cap comes off
& one blank face
gains a split. It
must be lonely
having the only
mouth. Do you take
a breath? Do you
invent eating?
Do you look for
another broken soul
& improvise some
kind of minimal
kiss? But wait
a while: soon
everyone will awake
& turn & stick
a yellow tongue
into the earth.

*

The podcast will be a little late this week. I wrote the poem two days ago in response to some video footage, but decided they didn’t really go together, and it could stand on its own. But I’d already made an audio recording, so I figured I could at least include that and maybe placate those impatient for the Woodrat Podcast. I think this is a pretty good fit with the Bridge to Nowhere series.

Posted in Audio, Greatest Hits, Plummer's Hollow, Poems & poem-like things | 14 Comments

Morning Porch: the movie

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Dave Bonta


Direct link to video on Vimeo.

More and more publishers are producing video trailers for new books. Perhaps it’s time to start making them for websites, too. This action-packed trailer, though, is intended less to promote The Morning Porch than simply to introduce it to new readers — something to embed on the About page.

I shot the video yesterday for my one-minute movies project, and I suppose I’ll still class it as such even though it goes five seconds over with the addition of the Paul Eluard quote (which I stole from a friend’s pseudonymous Facebook profile a while back). This one is definitely more documentary than videopoem. I could probably make it more exciting with a few, brief inserts of other images: you know, close-ups of things glimpsed from the porch. But that might clash with the message of the text, I don’t know. Here’s what I wrote for it:

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be a prisoner, condemned to the same round every day, compelled to do things I had little appetite for, surrounded by others in the same situation, all of us desperate with loneliness and the desire to be somewhere, anywhere else. What would I do? I’m a writer, so I suppose I would write. It would be an almost enviable situation: all that free time. I would take note of everything I saw, immerse myself in the moment no matter how bleak, because daydreaming would only lead to despair. I would write small, spare things 140 characters in length that some would call poems, but that I would see as clauses of one long sentence. I’d be in for life.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Memoir, Plummer's Hollow, Video, Videopoetry | Tagged | 22 Comments

Black Gum Trail

Posted on September 25, 2010 by Dave Bonta
autumn foliage on black gum (Nyssa sylvatica)

autumn foliage on black gum (Nyssa sylvatica)

It’s astonishing how few local residents are aware of the fall foliage display of black gum, which begins a month or more in advance of most other trees. The oblong pointed leaves go from green to yellow to orange to red, different trees and sometimes even different branches turning on different schedules. But you have to get out of your car to see it: black gum tends to grow either in swamps and bogs or on dry, acidic, heath-oak forests. In Plummer’s Hollow we have plenty of the latter, and black gum is a major understory tree for a couple miles along our Laurel Ridge. About 15 years ago, we built a footpath paralleling the Plummer’s Hollow Road about two-thirds of the way up the ridge-side to afford maximum access to the black gum, following existing animal trails wherever possible. Today we led a small group of fellow nature enthusiasts up Plummer’s Hollow Road and back along Black Gum Trail, trying to spread the word about this under-appreciated tree. Continue reading →

Posted in Greatest Hits, Photos, Plummer's Hollow, Trees | 18 Comments

Rock-Flipping Day 2010: houses made of twilight

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Dave Bonta

International Rock-flipping Day badge by cephalopodcast.comIt began raining right around midnight, the first real rain we’d had in more than a month, and I was happy, even though there was a good chance it would make for a soggy International Rock-Flipping Day. It was still raining when I got up around 6:30, but tapered off slowly into drizzle, then fine mist, then nothing at all by noon. Around 3:30, the sun came out.

my first rock for IRFD 2010

my first rock for IRFD 2010 (click all photos to see larger versions on Flickr)

So it was with mixed feelings that I slung the camera around my neck and set out to see what, if anything, I might find under some rocks. Due to the severity of the drought, I had a feeling that the answer would be “not much.” But I guess it all depends on what you’re looking for.

I started with a rock in the corner of the little herb/butterfly garden in front of my house, next to the concrete walk — a rock I placed there myself more than 15 years ago for decoration. If IRFD were held in the northern-hemisphere spring, I’m sure it would be good for an assortment of earthworms, sow bugs and ground beetles, but yesterday I saw nothing but shadows.

flipping the first rock

flipping the first rock

Still, they were interesting shadows, I thought.
Continue reading →

Posted in Greatest Hits, Photos, Plummer's Hollow, Rock-Flipping Day | 12 Comments

Fencing the dead cherry

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Dave Bonta

dead cherry tree inside a fence
One big advantage of living at the end of a mile-and-a-half-long, gated private road is I don’t have to worry about people driving by and wondering at my sanity.

“Mommy, why is that man putting a fence around a dead tree?”

“I don’t know, honey, but please don’t stare at him. When people let their lawns go like that, it usually means that they’re sick and they need help.”

“But Mommy, he just waved!”

“He probably wants us to stop so he can hurt us. Remember, honey, you should never talk to strangers.” Continue reading →

Posted in Greatest Hits, Plummer's Hollow, Trees | 18 Comments

Black cherry: tree of affliction

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Dave Bonta

black cherries

I always think of the wild black cherry (Prunus serotina) as a tree of affliction. Even its fruiting can be a burden to it on years like this, when branches bend low under the weight of the crop and black bears break them in their inexplicable eagerness to feast on the sour, stony fruits. Nor are they alone: as my mother wrote in a column last year,

In addition to cedar waxwings, I saw red-eyed vireos, blue jays, and scarlet tanagers harvesting wild black cherries, but the list of songbirds and other wildlife that feast on them is legion. Thoreau mentioned gray catbirds, brown thrashers, eastern kingbirds, blue jays, red-headed woodpeckers, eastern bluebirds and northern cardinals as the most common birds that eat wild black cherries, in addition to robins and cedar waxwings. Huge piles of bear scat studded with cherry pits on our trails testified to their popularity with bears. And the smaller animals, such as foxes, squirrels, and chipmunks, also ate the fruit.

Continue reading →

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Nemesis

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Dave Bonta

field cricketI caught him at last, that cricket, the enemy of my sleep! He was hiding behind my shrine, throwing his chirp so it sounded like it came from the black mirror or the bowl of artificial fruit. I caught him first in the beam of my flashlight, then in my hand, then in a drinking glass just long enough to snap a photo before banishing him to the outer darkness.

They say a cricket in the house is good luck, but I think a cricket outside is even better luck — for the cricket, at least. It’s not very likely to get lucky if it stays in here — take it from me. Besides, this house isn’t big enough for the two of us. Last night, after having kept quiet all evening, it started up just as I was drifting off, and I had to retreat upstairs and shut the door.

Why do field crickets come indoors every year, I wonder? I suppose they like the acoustics, and not unlike some poets I know, it doesn’t bother them if they’re performing for an audience of zero. Which wouldn’t be such a problem, I suppose, if their refrain were a little more varied and a little less shrill.

Just as I finish typing that last sentence, I glance over toward the wall next to the file cabinet and there’s another cricket! Or maybe it’s the same one — I only took him a hundred feet from the house. I dive for him, but he leaps away and scuttles under the moulding. Crap. I guess I’ll be sleeping upstairs for a while.

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Crickets

Posted on August 14, 2010 by Dave Bonta


Download the mp3

The broad-winged tree cricket calls day and night, his almost continuous trill like a more sonorous version of the sound that old-fashioned dial-up modems used to make. And in fact his main frequency of 3 kHz is just about the same as a telephone signal, but his pulse rate is a paltry 25 per second, which is less than a quarter as fast as the earliest true modems, the 110-baud Bell 101 devices developed in the 1950s to transmit data for the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system. If the cricket in my garden were a modem, he would take half a day to download the simplest, text-only web page.

As for the field cricket who’s made his way inside and now calls from a corner behind the couch, I think he’s saying sleep sleep sleep at a volume guaranteed to make sleep impossible. Jiminy! Maybe I’ll just stay up and surf the web.

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Banjo, luna

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Dave Bonta

banjo and leaf

Inspired by my uncle’s banjo, I spent a couple hours this morning revising some of my banjo poems. I’m beginning to think the series may have a future, but many of the poems still aren’t all they could be. I know because of the slight boredom they inspire in me — the feeling that I’ve had those thoughts too many times before. When I write a poem, I want to encounter at least one thing I’ve never seen before.

After supper, my brother got out his own banjo and played a few tunes. So a day that began with clawhammer ended with bluegrass. Except that wasn’t quite the end, because just after dark someone spotted a newly emerged luna moth on the side of a black walnut tree in the yard. It was just one tree over and one day later than last year’s luna moth. As I watched with a flashlight, a harvestman gangled up with the small, lifeless body of a spider dangling from its mandibles and stopped. The moth took a half-step back and its enormous antennae quivered for a second.

luna moth with harvestman

(See also the photo on my sadly neglected photoblog.)

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