Via Negativa

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Jefferson salamander, Blandburg, PA

Welcome

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.

• Recent Posts

  • Woodrat Podcast 10: John Miedema on Slow Reading
  • Acorn Barnacle
  • The Silent Banjo
  • Purple Sea Urchin
  • Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote…
  • Emergence
  • Woodrat Podcast 9: A Poet’s Way in Norway
  • Harlequin ladybird
  • Next Life
  • Top Poets
  • A Spell to Ward Off Banjos
  • Woodrat Podcast 8: Greening the Appalachians
  • Gacela of Unforeseen Love (videopoem)
  • Pete Seeger and Majora Carter: “Don’t say it can’t be done”
  • Beech grotesquerie

• Recent Comments

  • John on Woodrat Podcast 10: John Miedema on Slow Reading
  • James on Woodrat Podcast 10: John Miedema on Slow Reading
  • Bill on Woodrat Podcast 10: John Miedema on Slow Reading
  • Dave on Acorn Barnacle
  • Dave on Acorn Barnacle
  • Clive Hicks-Jenkins on Acorn Barnacle
  • Dave on Emergence
  • Dave on Acorn Barnacle
  • Dave on Next Life
  • Beth W. on Emergence

• Best of Via Negativa

  • Shooting Bambi
  • The Grave Dug by Beasts
  • Limited Issue
  • Don't tell my heart
  • Questions about birds
  • Bad maxims
  • United
  • Deadhead
  • Death takes a holiday
  • Sacrifice
• A random selection of greatest hits. Reload the page to see more.

• Archives

  Select Month March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003

• Series

  Bestiary
  Banjo Poems
  Poetics and Technology
  Honduran poetry
  The Tempations of Solitude
  Ridge and Valley: an exchange of poems
  Postcards from a Conquistador
  Public Poems
  Odes to Tools
  Blogging the Appalachians
  Self-Portraits
  Cibola (epic poem)
  

• My other projects on the web

  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

  (For a complete listing, see my Google profile)

•  

  "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.
    ----

  • The Middlewesterner
    Even the crow
    knows nothing

    except that hope
    is a kind of

    uselessness.
    ----

  • 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.
    ----

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All content by Dave Bonta at Via Negativa is available for reprint and remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.