Category Archives: Poets and poetry

Writing about craft, poetry book reviews and appreciations, and anything else that isn’t an original poem.

Letter to Mrs. Vorreyer’s English class

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Hello from Plummer’s Hollow! Thanks for all the postcards. I am gratified and humbled by your response to my poem, and I’m amazed by how many of you say you enjoy writing. When I was in 7th grade, I think I was one of two or three kids in the entire school who liked poetry.

Since there are 51 of you and there’s only one of me, I hope you won’t mind if I respond to you in one, big letter. I was really impressed by how many great lines, original insights, and eye-catching designs you guys came up with. It seems as if this kind of wondering (what if ghosts/aliens/dragons etc. were real) is a good way to get in the habit of questioning your preconceptions and trying to see things from radically different perspectives — two very useful habits for writers and artists to get into.

I know you aren’t expecting critiques, but I do want to mention a few of my favorite lines from the poems:

  • Anthony B., about spirits: “They would walk with humans/ like a man about to touch a porcupine.” Great comparison!
  • Agatha K., “What nobody knows about angels”: “Their wings are ill-fitting.” Angels are usually thought of as perfect beings, so it’s refreshing to think of them this way.
  • Magdalene H., “If Ghosts Were Real”: “They would fear most the day you would come join them.” Good idea to implicate the reader in the last line.
  • Ryan T., “Spirits”: “They try to communicate with you to warn you of their presence” A subtle way of suggesting the paradoxical nature of their existence, especially when combined with the last line: “They are afraid of the silence of death.”
  • Finn V., “If There Were Aliens”: I like the hint of reference to our society’s on-going political debate over the status of undocumented immigrants in the lines “They would speak only English// They would be afraid/ of what is beyond.” Not only is it interesting and unexpected to say such things about space aliens, but it gets the reader thinking about xenophobia generally, and the role it might play in our lives — without actually telling anyone what to think or making any explicit political pronouncements.
  • James M., “If I Knew a Ghost”: I love the image in the opening line — “He would be warm and free as a worn-out sofa.”
  • Brett B., “Ghosts”: “Their lips are cracked beyond repair.” I really like that for some reason. Also the bit about Jarritos! I guess I like poems that are funny and serious at the same time. That’s not always easy to pull off.
  • Jasmine M., “If Aliens Came to Earth”: I kind of agree with the suggestion that beings from another world might be more intrigued by our oceans than anything else!
  • Stella L., “Would Ghosts”: “Would they run through the street/ like a plastic bag/ being pulled elsewhere by the calm wind” I’ve always liked the sort of everyday uncanniness of those so-called urban tumbleweeds, so I think connecting them with ghosts is a good idea.
  • Emily O., “Mermaid Under the Sea”: I like “She would have eyes that changed color/ as often as the tide.” It’s a good trick to make people think you’re writing about one thing while really, or in addition, writing about something else — in this case, the sea. Poems work best when we don’t understand them completely after the first reading.
  • Terry D., “If You Could Actually Ride a Unicorn”: “You would notice the fleas in the fur.” I love the hyper-realism in this portrait of a mythical being. As with Agatha’s angels, focusing on the imperfections makes it seem more tangible.
  • Selin T., “Broken Ghost”: “A ghost is like a secret/ for it has left its home/ and will never return.” I like the way this gets me thinking about secrets as well as ghosts.

poetry postcard flags 2

Now let me take a shot at answering your questions. A few of you wondered how long it took me to write the poem. I don’t remember for sure, but probably no more than a couple of hours. Or, since I’ve been writing poetry for almost 40 years, you could also say it took me 40 years to write it, since everything I’ve learned in that time shapes each poem I write.

Several people asked where I got the ideas for the specific images and comparisons in the poem. I don’t remember with absolute certainty, but let’s see… I find potatoes a little creepy with their eyes that turn into sprouts — they have a life after death, so to speak. So that’s probably where that came from. With the missing eyebrows, I think my guiding idea was that ghosts would be incapable of emotions such as surprise or anger, so they would have no need of eyebrows to raise or wrinkle.

Why banks and stock exchanges? These are ghostly places to me because they are concerned entirely with money, which is the ultimate in spookiness since on the one hand we’ve made it essential to survival, but on the other hand, it doesn’t really exist. Besides, why would ghosts hang around cemeteries? Do the living hang around the hospitals where they were born?

I’m not entirely sure where the part about stepping into traffic as into a cold mountain lake came from. It’s the part of the poem I’m proudest of, though. As for “ah,” I like both its ubiquity as an expression and its ambiguity. I picture ghosts as being equally common, ambiguous and bland. A ghost would never do something as melodramatic as moan, you see.

Joseph M. asked, “Why do you write poetry? Do you just like writing it, or do you want to tell a message, or what?” A mixture of both, I guess, but more than that, I write poetry to find things out. It’s my way of trying to make sense of the world — and to find out what I think. Usually when I begin a poem I have little idea about where it’s going, but attentiveness to the sound and rhythm of the language and to the ideas behind the images that come to me as I write takes me in new and unexpected directions. I think the feeling a writer gets after writing a successful poem probably isn’t too different from what a scientist feels after making some new discovery: a great deal of excitement and wonder. I live for wonder.

Many of you asked where I get my ideas, or what inspires me. The short answer is everything. I’m curious about everything and read as widely as possible, especially nonfiction — and other poets. That’s critically important, too. As is regular engagement with the world outside my door. There are some poets for whom writing is primarily a game with language, and that’s fine, but for me, it’s about connecting with the world and with other people.

Does living in the mountains help me write? Yes, I suppose so, but anyone with an internet connection has to be wary of distractions! I also need to travel now and then to avoid the feeling of isolation one sometimes gets living in the country, though the internet really helps in that regard. I don’t think it’s easier to write poems about nature than about people — if anything, the opposite is probably true. My favorite poets, such as Tomas Tranströmer, who just won the Nobel Prize, manage to write equally well about both.

Mary K. asked if I set out to write about ghosts in a way no one had written before. No, it’s really just a mental habit which I’ve had ever since I was a kid: if everyone else says one thing, I’ll say the opposite.

What was the hardest part about writing the poem? I don’t remember for sure, but I seem to recall the lines in the middle were the ones I spent the most time on. (Unfortunately, since I draft everything in Word, I don’t keep any paper trail of my changes the way I used to when I wrote everything out by hand.)

What is the hardest part of writing in general, for me? Getting started. Often all it takes is a word or a fragment of an idea, though, to spark something good.

What do I do when I get writer’s block? I’m not sure I ever have, but I do go through somewhat dry spells in which I would rather take pictures or make videos than write. My response is to go ahead and do that — eventually I’ll get tired of it and go back to writing. Also, having a daily blog habit is a great spur to regular writing.

How hard is it to edit a magazine? Not hard, but very time-consuming. And of course making the decision to curate other people’s work does mean I have to give up some of the time I might otherwise spend writing my own. But I think it pays off, because I learn so much from reading other people, and that ultimately enriches my own work. The hardest part is having to turn away good work because there just isn’t quite enough room for it. But at the online magazine I edit, three-quarters of the time I have other people editing issues and making those tough decisions, and all I have to do is arrange the issues and create a podcast.

How do I make money off my poetry? I don’t! Sadly, there is almost no money in poetry publishing in the English-speaking world. On the other hand, this is liberating in a way, because it frees me to give my poetry away online, and let people use it to make other works of their own, as long as they give me credit somewhere. Thanks to this attitude, I’ve been able to embark on a number of creative collaborations with other writers and artists. So while it would be great to be able to make a living doing this, there are many other ways besides money to measure success.

Jack R. asked about building an audience: how do you get people outside your family to read your work? First of all, if some of your family members do read your work, you’re more fortunate than many writers. There are lots of online critique groups, though I’ve never tried them myself. Facebook can be a decent place to share writing. I’m personally fond of blogs, though I realize blogging isn’t for everyone. The most important thing to remember I guess is that if you want other writers to read your work, you have to read theirs. A surprising number of people never seem to grasp this.

I think that answers almost all your questions. Thanks for all your kind words about my poetry, and I’m glad you were able to use it to spark your own writing.

Last night when I told a blogger friend about your postcards, she suggested I get a needle and some yarn, put them on a string and hang them from my front porch like Tibetan prayer flags. So I did. It was a breezy day, and if the Tibetans are right, I guess that means the spirit-forms of your words are drifting all around Central Pennsylvania by now. After a couple hours, I took the cards back inside for safe-keeping.

Best wishes in everything you do,

Dave Bonta

poetry postcard flags 3

Posted in Greatest Hits, Poets and poetry | Tagged , | Comments Off

Dear solitude,

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Luisa A. Igloria
This entry is part 12 of 86 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

what is it like to live by oneself?
I can no longer remember, or if I ever
truly did. Surely it can’t have been

in the short month intervening after I
graduated from college and then got married,
believing that was the only way I might

finally make a life, something of my own.
Neither can it have been in the years
I went to graduate school, the first time

after my second child was born; and then again
when my third child turned three— Roommates
down the hall sharing the bathroom,

sharing the fridge and kitchen (though also
cleaning duties). And at home, with growing
children and extended family, never any

door that one could keep closed for too long.
I didn’t really mind, but also welcomed
summers when I could slip away by myself

to visit a friend, go to a writing retreat,
work free of the coils of schedules and
routines for two short weeks. Oh the joys

of breakfast at 11 and bedtime at 3, a walk
with no other purpose than the walk itself.
On the other hand, my pathologist friend

in Chicago, who’d lived by himself for over
thirty years, sometimes told me how he wished
for human sounds in the middle of the night,

in the empty bedrooms of his tastefully
furnished flat— how he’d scan the trees
bereft of birds and their call and response,

how sometimes he’d flush the toilet in the guest
bathroom at random times of day, just to hear
the water gurgling before eddying away.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 04 2011

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted in Guest writers, Poets and poetry | Tagged | 3 Comments

Kay Ryan on nonsense, poetry, and knowledge

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Dave Bonta


Watch on Vimeo. The Lannan Foundation has also uploaded a video of the reading that directly preceded the conversation.

I usually share other people’s videos only on Facebook or (for poetry-related stuff) Moving Poems, but the length and via negativistic content of this conversation might make it a better fit here, I thought. I love what Kay Ryan has to say about poetry and knowing, and about knowing and making stuff up. You have to watch the video to really get a feel for how unseriously she takes herself, but I spent some time this morning making a transcript of a few of my favorite parts of this conversation, which occur somewhere near the middle. This helps me understand a little bit better what I do myself in my writing — especially the part about the need for coldness.

*

Kay Ryan: “I think nonsense is extremely close to poetry. Nonsense — I figured this out when I was fairly young — nonsense operates by rules. You cannot have nonsense outside the context of sense. It, uh — it’s in tension with sense.”

Atsuro Riley: “You like to make a statement in your poetry. You’re quite willing to do it, you like to do it, you seem insistent upon it — ”

Ryan: “A lot of them are bogus, though. They’re bogus. You know. I like the fake — I think you pointed this out! — the sort of, you know, the pedant, the mock polemic. Yeah. And they’re just ridiculous, you know. Like uh, oh, what’s the one about the, uh, extraordinary lengths… Oh yeah, right — I don’t know, uh, ‘Extraordinary lengths are always accompanied by extraordinary distances.’ And, you know, that’s just such a stupid thing to say! I just love to say something like that. I, uh —

“Well, let me explain that. I like to make — well, boy, I’m glad you brought that up. Because I, I think that I’m really interested in something that is so hard to perceive. Like light coming from the furthest star. It’s, it’s, it’s very frail when it gets here. Very frail. But looked at another way, it’s incredibly strong, ’cause it’s gotten all the way here from the furthest star. So it’s something incredible strong, but we’re getting just a little bit of it!

“So what I do, what I try to do with this thing that I can just barely perceive, is to jack up the intensity like crazy. Make a cartoon out of it? You know. Make a diorama, have puppets do it. You know — overdo it. I’ve gotta magnify it because it’s — and I have to sound more sure than I am. Because — because I don’t know. I only a teeny tiny bit know! Maybe. I’m trying to know. So I build up — I build something that I hope has a lot of, uh — well, as my step-daughter would say, flavor-punch. I like flavor-punch. I love Southwestern food! But I like to give a lot of color. And reality. Of course it’s all specious, but, uh, you know — ”

Riley: “But to help you think through the question.”

Ryan: “To help me think, yeah. It’s like setting up — and I think you said, too — ”

Riley: “Magnified conundra.”

Ryan: “Yeah. And little, uh, models. You know? Einstein — and I always like to connect myself with Einstein! — Einstein, you know, worked in the patent office. Before he was — before he thought his really great thoughts. And I think it shaped his mind to a certain degree. That business of seeing in terms of models. And I think that that’s what we do in poems. (I mean, not just me, but — ) We make a model, and it’s really a model for something different. I mean, this is the model, but it’s really trying to talk about that starlight somehow. That little thing we just know with some interior part of our brain, to which we have very little access.”

Riley: “Let’s talk about coldness. What is it in a poem — I’m not sure I exactly understand — and, um, why do you like it?”

Ryan: “Well, I mean I think it’s just constitutional. I think — I think one of the things that we do when we write, or one of the things I’ve done, is try to make a world I could live in. You know? I make in my poems a world that is, uh, congenial to me. ‘I like how she thinks!’ You know? It makes me feel at ease to articulate those things. It, uh — I can make a world that has the rules that I want. And I think that, as most people here [in the audience are], I am sensitive. I feel under… I am too stimulated. There’s too much coming in all the time. There’s too much heat. There’s too much closeness. There’s too much personal. There’s too much giving away of secrets. There’s not enough, ah, distance. There’s not enough chill. And if I can do my small part to add a little coldness and distance to the world, I will not have written in vain.”

[...]

Ryan: “I discovered a long time ago — and it seems so counter-intuitive, but I found that I had to start writing about things when I was just on the front edge of knowing about them. I mean, just — I hardly knew about them. If I waited, I would be paralyzed by knowing too much. And I, I couldn’t write. There always has to be a large sense of, ‘Oh, I’m just inventing this.’ But then later you can look back and say, ‘No actually I wasn’t inventing it. I still think that I, that there’s something there that I will stick with.’ But I always have to write it before. And if I’m overwhelmed by knowledge, or feeling, or something, it’s just no — I just can’t write.”

Posted in Poets and poetry, The via negativa, Video | 7 Comments

Woodrat Podcast 44: Reversible books

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Dave Bonta

watch on YouTube – watch on Vimeo

The Woodrat Podcast returns from summer vacation with its first ever video episode (but don’t worry, this will remain mostly an audio show). I wanted to do a bit of a show-and-tell with some poetry books published as reversible, upside-down or tête-bêche books, including, most recently, Triplicity by Kristen McHenry and Paper Covers Rock by Chella Courington, forthcoming from Indigo Ink Press.

Additional links:

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

Posted in Books and Music, Poets and poetry, Woodrat Podcast | Tagged , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Mole

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Dave Bonta


Watch on Vimeo.

If you’ve been following this blog for even a little while, you must’ve noticed snippets from a blog called mole in the Smorgasblog and seen comments from its author, Dale Favier. Dale’s one of my oldest friends in the blogosphere (we’ve even met twice in person!) and he claims it was my example at Via Negativa that first got him to try his hand at modern poetry. (He had been primarily a fan of Victorian and Middle English poetry before that, so I think “modern” means “anything that doesn’t rhyme.”) Dale’s first collection of poems, Opening the World, is due out in September from the U.K.-based Pindrop Press, and I recently had the pleasure of reading it in manuscript. You can read what Luisa Igloria wrote about it on the publisher’s webpage.

With Dale’s book fresh in my mind, a sighting of a hairy-tailed mole in the lawn in front of my parents’ veranda on Monday morning seemed providential: videopoem material for the mole blogger! (See the Plummer’s Hollow blog for the full, 15-minute video and a few quotes about the largely unknown life of this mammal.) But figuring out which poem to envideo proved surprisingly difficult; several were a pretty good fit, but none was a perfect fit, I thought. Finding the right soundtrack was even more difficult, and consumed many hours. I’m not convinced that the trip-hop instrumental I finally settled on was optimal, but I think it works fairly well. A mole out foraging on the surface after daybreak does seem like an apt choice for a poem about mortality. There are a whole host of predators that could dispatch it at any moment — foxes, coyotes, weasels, fishers, feral cats, owls, hawks — especially considering how blind it is, and how close it let the three of us human watchers get.

I hasten to add that lack of awareness is not a characteristic I associate with Dale Favier! But vulnerability — perhaps, yes. I was a little more succinct than Luisa, but here’s the blurb I wrote:

Dale Favier is a new kind of American Buddhist poet, one less concerned with wisdom than compassion and desire, and as comfortable with the fables and paradoxes of the West as those of the East. His poems sing, chant, weep, declaim and delight. Earnest to a fault, yet always ready to indulge in foolishness and absurdity, Favier wears his erudition lightly and takes risks that few professional poets would take: “They have not written this in books;/ they would not dare; they have their suppers to earn.” Johan Huizinga wrote in Homo Ludens that poetry “proceeds within the play-ground of the mind,” and “the true appellation of the archaic poet is vates, the possessed, the God-smitten, the raving one.” Favier is one of the few modern poets I know who seems to fit this ancient mold. Opening the World documents no mere dalliance with ideas, but a life-long, passionate struggle with gods and mortals, love and death.

Posted in Books and Music, Nature/Ecology, Poets and poetry, Videopoetry | Tagged | 7 Comments

La fin d’une affaire

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Dave Bonta

The sadness of discovering that a poet you’ve loved for years no longer speaks to you, that her lines no longer resonate — how can this be? Could you have been wrong all along, hearing things that weren’t there? (But poetry is always about what isn’t quite there, isn’t it?) Has reading too many other poets with a markedly different aesthetic spoiled you for hers? You keep taking that one book, your former favorite, off the shelf and trying again, to see if maybe you just have to be in the right mood. But if so, that mood no longer comes. How could you ever have found such dull and predictable work exciting?

Even as you wonder this, it occurs to you that perhaps your craving for excitement and diversion marks you as a shallow reader, a poor listener. You try reading a poem as slowly as possible, pausing often to let the words sink in. Nothing. Gradually you begin to realize that, right or wrong, the heart cannot be ignored, and whoever’s fault it may be, this once great pleasure, this astonishment, will come no more.

And then, three books away on the shelf, you notice one you’ve never opened since the day you brought it home from the book sale…

Posted in Poets and poetry | 7 Comments

Typewriting

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 23 of 23 in the series Poetics and technology

typewriter by Darwin Bell

photo by Darwin Bell (CC BY-NC license) - click to enlarge

Writing is hardly an innocent act. I remember with what force I had to strike the keys of my dad’s old manual typewriter when I was a kid. How the ribbon would rise to the occasion like someone throwing himself between an assailant and his victim, absorbing the blows. And as the ribbon ran dry, how the type would slowly fade, prompting me to pound the keys harder and harder, pummeling the paper, turning the letters into pale, shallow graves.

The first time I used an electric typewriter, it felt like cheating. It was in 4th or 5th Grade. I was typing up a parody of the movie Jaws — “Lips,” which we would later perform in appropriate costume. One of the kids who’d volunteered to help on the play sat and watched my two-finger typing, studying me closely but not saying a word until I was done. “I think I understand how you’re doing that now,” he said. I hadn’t realized until that moment that it was a kind of magic trick.

I took touch typing as an elective in high school, and of course we used nothing but the most modern IBM Selectrics. That was in 1982, I think. But when I started at Penn State two years later, it was nothing but the old manual for me. I figured as long as I had a newish ribbon and a sturdy, erasable bond, that was good enough. And in my own writing, watching a poem take shape letter by letter and word by word… I find myself almost salivating now as I recall the pleasure of that tactile experience. Poems were things that you hammered out by hand, which is perhaps how poets were able to unironically refer to poetry-writing classes as “workshops.” And most lyric poems being fairly short and the look on the page difficult to grasp with too many hand corrections, it was easier to just keep hammering out new drafts. I have a huge file box upstairs filled with nothing but those abandoned prototypes, like the empty larval shells of cicadas. The final drafts sit in a nicer, metal tomb downstairs, beside my writing table. It’s hard to simply throw out a handmade thing.

After we bought the adjacent property here in Plummer’s Hollow in 1992, we had the melancholy task of going through the derelict house where our neighbor Margaret had lived almost until her death the previous year. Among her possessions were three typewriters from her youth in the 1930s or 40s, when she had pursued a secretarial career in New York City. They were huge and black, archaic as ringer washers or Model T Fords. By that time I had switched to a word processor and was happy to have put the typewriter era behind me, so when a friend mentioned he collected typewriters, I passed those machines onto him without a second thought. Now I kind of wish I’d kept one of them as a conversation piece.

Around that same time, I had some people up for a party, and they all had a good laugh at the ancient, hulking, hand-me-down of a PC I was using. It must’ve been at least ten years old! I used WordPerfect 6.0, and only a Courier font because that’s what typing was supposed to look like. A few years later, I finally upgraded and put the old beast out to pasture — literally. I didn’t know then about the heavy metals and other hazardous substances found in circuit boards, cathode ray tubes and the like. So now it sits in a shallow, unmarked grave somewhere out in the goldenrod patch we call a field.


Prompted by Beth’s latest post, “Process,” at the cassandra pages.

Posted in Memoir, Poets and poetry | 18 Comments

Patience, young grasshopper: a beginner’s insights into attention

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Master Po: Close your eyes. What do you hear?
Young Caine: I hear the water, I hear the birds.
Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat?
Caine: No.
Po: Do you hear the grasshopper which is at your feet?
Caine: Old man, how is it that you hear these things?
Po: Young man, how is it that you do not?
“Kung Fu” (TV series), pilot episode, 1972

A grasshopper doesn’t move when I pass her on the concrete walk through the front garden to my door. This seems unusual, and I crouch down for a closer look. I think the bright red hind legs might make it red-legged grasshopper, Melanoplus femurrubrum, but it’s probably something in that genus, at any rate. I notice the end of the abdomen is swelling and contracting, and keeps pressing against the concrete like a finger probing for a weak spot. She takes a few steps forward, presses the concrete some more, then steps off the walk into the garden and immediately finds a patch of bare dirt that behaves as expected, yielding to pressure. The swelling and contracting of the abdomen, combined with steady pressure from the big hind legs, slowly forces it into the soil to the depth of about a centimeter. The grasshopper now remains immobile for the next several minutes except for a slight throbbing of the abdomen, which I presume denotes the deposition of eggs.

The more this grasshopper absorbs my attention, the more I notice of her surroundings, too: the small black ant walking in tight circles beside her, a larger red ant that crosses the walk in a more purposeful manner, the black field cricket — half the length of the grasshopper but just as fat, and twice as charismatic — who comes down the walk toward me and crosses into the moss garden. I hear a hummingbird buzzing into the spicebush above my head, then dropping down almost to my ear and hovering for a second before rising into the lilac and briefly perching. Even as I watch, others are watching me.

When the grasshopper pulls out, she climbs back up onto the sidewalk, which has evidently lost none of its attractiveness. She crosses it slowly, again “fingering” it with the end of her abdomen every inch of the way. How can any creature be so unaware as to mistake hard concrete for soil, just because it’s a similar color? Finally she stumbles off the other side of the walk and onto another suitable patch of dirt where the moss hasn’t grown in yet. Since our last rain was just two days ago, again she has no trouble penetrating the soil surface with her throbbing organ. I stand up slowly from my crouch, but clearly she is too intent on egg-laying to notice me and the threat to her existence I represent.

A nascent online community devoted to “practicing the art of attention,” This Life Lived, challenges members this week to consider the nature of attention itself:

What does “attention” mean to you? How do you define attention for yourself? What do you look like when you are paying attention, and what are you doing? What do you feel when you are at full attention: Do you feel calm and still, or do you feel wired and energized?

Try to construct a clear and personal definition of attention this week. If you struggle to get started, you could say to yourself or write in your journal, “To me, attention means that I am ______________ .” Then describe that definition in detail. Take time with your personal definition. Notice yourself throughout the coming week, and try to catch yourself in the act of paying attention. Notice what that act or moment does for you, and how it affects your day.

To me, attention means that I am going out of myself, not unlike the egg-laying grasshopper — and in the process, making myself vulnerable. Somehow, I think, the vulnerability is key to the whole experience. Although I am fortunate to live on a mountain with (at present) no man-eating carnivores or poisonous snakes, crouching down in the woods or fields at various times of the year can definitely be hazardous, exposing one to Lyme disease-carrying deer ticks. I don’t spend a whole lot of time obsessing about that, but the point is that the vulnerability of a rapt observer is real and not theoretical. Women and girls of course experience another whole dimension of vulnerability in many seemingly remote areas. In any case, my point is that we are the products of millions of years of evolution in which we were usually prey animals as well as hunters and foragers, and I think the kinds of attention we experience today have been shaped by all three of those roles (among others). I’d go so far as to suggest that the way the attention rather quickly widens out when we focus on one thing is an adaptive behavior. We may be focusing on what’s right in front of us — some hard-to-spot wild root crop, say — but if a twig snaps the wrong way, we’ll hear it.

When I sit out on the porch drinking my coffee in the morning, much of the time I am not paying attention. But at a certain point I’ll remember that I need some interesting observation to write about for The Morning Porch, and at that point I turn into a kind of hunter-gatherer. I don’t have a clear search-image in mind, but I’m alert for anything that will make good writing fodder. Often I begin by listening, mentally naming everything I hear, which at this time of year may not be much: goldfinch chittering, the steady trill of tree crickets, the whine of an annual cicada, a passing jet, the faint sounds of traffic from the gap. Just listening like this makes me more aware of what I’m seeing, too, and it’s a good way to begin because listening is inherently more absorptive than looking, which preserves a distance between observer and observed. Sometimes then I’ll stand up and start taking a mental inventory of the plants in my front yard.

It’s funny: as I’ve probably mentioned here before, when I was a kid I was very resistant to the idea of learning names for wild things, because it seemed to me that once we associate something with a fixed name, we make it much more difficult to see that thing in a different light. Now that I’m a writer, though, I’ve bowed to necessity and put a high priority on learning the common names. It’s true, you can have some sort of relationship with something for years without knowing what it’s called. Perhaps someone more enlightened than me can experience something akin to the Zen ideal of direct seeing — good luck with that. In my experience, knowing a name is the first step toward making something’s acquaintance in a real way.

As many thousands of times as I walked up the road as a kid, coming home from school, I never knew the names of the plants whose hard, comma-shaped seeds could so easily be stripped from the stalk, or the ones with fleshy, translucent stems that snapped so easily. They were my companions in dawdling; I de-seeded and uprooted them unmercifully as an occupation for my distracted fingers. Was I really paying attention to those unnamed plants? Not really. It was only about ten years ago, on a hike sponsored by our local Audubon chapter, that I finally learned what people call them: jumpseed (Polygonum virginianum) and clearweed (Pilea pumila), a stingless nettle. These names were so right, and so delightful, I was immediately ashamed of my long-standing callousness, and I haven’t been able to see either plant since without an inward smile of recognition.

If you’re a poet, you’re probably familiar with some version of that relaxed-yet-focused, semi-trance state in which the best lines and ideas come to the surface. I’m sure other artists get into that zone as well. For me, its strongest analogy is to hypnagogia (thanks for the word, Natalie!): it is a mild kind of threshold consciousness characterized by increased receptivity and suggestibility. As with actual hypnagogia, it’s a state that often yields real insights. But it’s not so different, either, from that state of attention I found myself in this morning, watching the grasshopper probe the ground with her ovipositor, or earlier, on the porch, listening to goldfinches and watching them glean seeds from the wild thistle. I was open, I was vulnerable, I was letting things in.

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Notes on poetic form

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Dave Bonta

One of the most interesting things that Marly Youmans said in our conversation for the Woodrat podcast was that she began using form in poetry as a consequence of writing prose fiction, because she wanted to make her poems as unlike prose as possible. She also said she liked how trying to find words to fit set rhyme schemes and meters pushed poems in unexpected directions. These two statements have forced me to analyze my own approach to poetry a little bit — in particular, why I still prefer nonce forms or free verse, and why I so quickly get bored whenever I try to write in established forms.

Marly’s right: the discipline of adhering to a strict form can enforce more creative responses. In a way, I encounter something like this every day when I try to fit a lyrical observation into 140 or fewer characters for The Morning Porch. On rare occasions when I’ve dabbled with end-rhyming forms, I have been entertained by some of the odd directions in which this can take a poem. But I’ve also been frustrated by the necessity of abandoning other, equally odd and perhaps more fruitful directions because I couldn’t find a rhyme word. The results have tended to leave me with mixed feelings: they are fun to read, for sure, but they also stay somewhat more on the surface than I like.

Of course, one person’s depth is another person’s shallows, and I make no claim to profundity in any absolute sense. But the fact remains that I write poems first and foremost to discover what I am thinking. Writing a poem involves a kind of extremely attentive listening, in which, ideally, every word and every phrase should be questioned: Is this really the optimal way to express the idea taking shape in my mind? And rhythm and sound are absolutely key. Often, I’ll know I need to end a breath with a one- or two-syllable word, but not which one. Quite often, too, the right word is the one with the best assonance and/or alliteration with its predecessors.

This is one of the most pleasurable and surprising — and perhaps also troubling — things about writing, to me: how the best-sounding words and phrases are also those that seem most right. One sees this of course in political and other forms of discourse, as well: how often our supposed search for meaning in fact brings us under “the spell of the sensuous,” to quote philosopher David Abrams’ resonant phrase.

I don’t know if what I write could be considered free verse or not — I’ve never taken a poetry class — but I do know it is anything but undisciplined. I often go out of my way not to include end-rhymes, either rearranging the lines to hide them, or else thinking up other words in their stead. I don’t want my poems to be song-like and melodic; I want them to sound more like the 20th-century classical music I grew up with, with relatively few repeating figures and lots of pleasing dissonances. I’m not saying I always achieve this, of course, but it’s what I strive for:


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Ghost poems

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Dave Bonta

If you read this blog via RSS or email, don’t miss the comment thread to yesterday’s poem about ghosts. Luisa Igloria and Dale Favier responded with some ghost poetry of their own, so I put out a call on Facebook and Google+ for more, and as a result we have a growing and varied collection of ghost poems. Feel free to add your own to the mix. If you’re a blogger yourself, you could make it your post of the day and duplicate your poem at your own site.

Thinking about the intersection between this world and the world of the dead really seems to put the imagination into overdrive. It occurs to me that ghost stories have a lot in common with the telling of dreams: they are one kind of narrative where surrealism is not only tolerated but actively welcomed by non-literary folks. For this reason, I think they are excellent Trojan horses for smuggling a bit more poetry into everyday life. Lyric poetry proper, though, can do something a straight narrative generally will not: make us pay close attention to the sound and flavor of our thoughts. What would ghosts be like? What could it mean to be in the world but not of it? And have we modern humans so cut ourselves off from the natural world now that we are closer to the realm of ghosts than to embodied reality?

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