Blog Archives

Economy, memory and inspiration

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 14 of 23 in the series Poetics and technology

Economy issue of qarrtsiluniAsk a chef to name his favorite dish, and he’ll likely say, “Anything I don’t have to prepare myself.” If it’s his own recipe, though: “Wow! This tastes familiar, but it was never this good when I made it!”

That’s kind of been my reaction to reading the print edition of qarrtsiluni’s Economy issue, which I had almost nothing to do with this time, since Beth found an excellent volunteer proofreader, Brittany Larkin, to help her out (thanks, Brittany!). I did have a hand in ordering the contents, since Beth followed the order of the posts in the online issue, which the issue editors, Anna Dickie and Pamela Hart, had left up to me. I was also intimately familiar with the poems, essays, stories and images since I’m the one who sets the posts up for publication, edits the audio, and puts together the podcasts.

Still, it’s been a year since we serialized Economy online, so I was pleased to rediscover some things about the issue that had kind of slipped my mind. I’d forgotten, for example, how many Scottish contributors it had — no surprise since Anna is Scottish herself, but appropriate for the theme since Scots are, rightly or wrongly, associated with thriftiness. In order to keep the print version affordable, the interior images are all black-and-white, but it was still fun to see all six of artist Alec Finlay’s oatcakes in the form of famous lakes and islands gathered on the same page, even if they didn’t look quite as edible as they do in the full-color versions online.

laptop version of qarrtisluni's Economy issueI don’t own a proper laptop, let along a mobile device, e-reader, or tablet computer, so this was my first laptop experience with the issue — the first time I’ve been able to read it on my front porch. I’m in the camp of those who, like my friend John Miedema, believe that reading books is a fundamentally different experience from reading online, though it sounds as if the Kindle and some of the other new e-readers are blurring the distinction quite a bit.

This is actually one of the reasons we’re experimenting with print-on-demand versions of qarrtsiluni issues: we want to encourage deeper, more reflective reading. As publishers, we love making authors’ works accessible to anyone with a good internet connection, but we worry that, by serializing small bits of content on a daily basis, we are simply pandering to the average online reader’s short attention span and need for a regular fix. I do feel, however, that publishers can help mitigate the distracted nature of online reading by providing audio players alongside texts, as we do at qarrtsiluni. In fact, I think this is one of the web’s huge advantages for literary publishing, especially of poetry. So far, I haven’t seen any article on the slow reading movement (of which Miedema is an advocate) and/or review of Nicholas Carr’s new book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, make this point — not even the very thorough Christian Science Monitor cover story, “Is tech rewiring our thinking?” (that’s the print title), which I had the privilege of reading in print form this morning, since my parents subscribe and pass it on to me.

But of course audio isn’t an option at too many magazines yet, so perhaps it doesn’t merit mention. The audio podcasting craze peaked around 2006, I think, right before YouTube took off. Now all the tech pundits seem to think that video is the online medium of the future and nothing else is worth talking about — but video is a lot more expensive to produce, and besides, the advent of television didn’t do away with radio, did it? I continue to feel that the combination of text and audio players on the same virtual page is a wonderful thing, even if not every author is the best interpreter of her own work. (Over at Linebreak, a literary magazine I admire, they post audio of a poet other than the author reading each poem, which is a pretty neat approach, too.)

I might not have remembered every nuance of every poem and story in the Economy issue, but to my surprise and amusement I did remember many of the poets’ voices, and heard them in my head as I read through the print edition. Of course, a Scottish accent is pretty memorable for a Yank like me, but I found I remembered the accents of many of the other poets too: Alex Cigale’s precise consonants, Tom Sheehan’s age-mellowed Boston accent, Eileen Tabios’ hilariously seductive reading of “Post-Coital,” Monica Raymond’s world-weary, vatic cadence in the closing piece, “Economies.”

I think the fact that I was still able to conjure these up a year later is a pretty strong testimony to the power of audio to focus attention. The Monitor article mentions Socrates’ dismissal of written language in passing, as a way to call into question the seriousness of these new criticisms of electronic media, treating it as self-evident that Socrates was just a conservative old fart. But Socrates was right, as any number of studies of contemporary oral societies have shown: dependence on writing systems has harmed our memories and fundamentally altered our ability to listen and thereby internalize language. Heard speech is alive in a way that printed words are not, though our ability to record and now digitize it does alter its ephemerality, if not quite its relationship to time. The druids too opposed literacy, for much the same reason as Socrates, but they took a huge gamble in doing so and essentially lost: what we know of them today is largely what was written down by their enemies. And would anyone remember Socrates if not for Plato?

Economy in the gardenJust as there are tradeoffs in transitioning from orality to literacy, so too, I think, are there tradeoffs in making the mental adaptations to a more webby organization of knowledge. I’ve always been prone to associative thinking myself, so it’s no surprise I’ve become addicted to the web. Reading books (and occasionally magazines, such as the Christian Science Monitor’s print weekly) remains a great pleasure, however. This past April, when I read and reviewed a book of poetry a day, I didn’t feel as if I was depriving myself of anything to spend all that reading time away from the computer each day.

Like a lot of people, I’m still trying to find the right balance between online and offline reading, but since I’m also a writer, I have another way to measure the satisfaction I get from different media: not only how much do they stay with me and impact my thinking, but also how well do they inspire me? And I have to say that these days I am just as likely to feel that familiar tickle in the back of the brain that says “poem on the way” after watching a bunch of videopoems or listening to poetry podcasts as I am after reading a print collection. Inspiration is a kind of gestalt experience for me, so perhaps it’s no surprise that I find these novel combinations of printed, digital and oral texts and still and moving images so stimulating.

Phoenicia Publishing is running a brief sale: 10% off all qarrtsiluni print editions through August 5. See the site sidebar for details.

Posted in Books and Music, Greatest Hits, Poets and poetry | Comments Off

Literary journals in the age of the internet

Posted on August 15, 2010 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 15 of 23 in the series Poetics and technology

Newsweek magazine recently celebrated Arianna Huffington as the savior of online journalism, so I thought a Huffington Post piece on “17 Literary Journals that Might Survive the Internet” might offer some unique insights into how magazines like qarrtsiluni could better leverage the ever-evolving technologies of web distribution. No such luck.

In his set-up, Anis Shivani asks how literary magazines are surviving and thriving amidst the rise of the Internet, but all the examples are of one particular kind of literary magazine: those existing primarily or entirely in print. It’s a classic bait-and-switch. And there’s a pretty amusing dissonance between the medium and the message here: a procession of brief, punchy quotes from lit mag editors decrying the shallowness of our culture, each accompanied by a poll to let readers vote on whether their particular magazine is dead or thriving, on a scale of 1 to 10. Still, unlike Shivani’s mean-spirited compendium of over-rated writers from last week, this new piece of HuffPo literary link-bait is invaluable for its insights into the thinking of the American literary print-magazine establishment. I think the editor of Pleiades, Wayne Miller, best encapsulates the scarcity-thinking that seems to afflict most of these editors:

As more people put out literary publications — and the Internet makes this even easier, since online magazines don’t need to secure distribution — it becomes increasingly difficult to capture the attention of an audience that’s naturally limited in size. I don’t think the Internet shrinks or grows that audience significantly, it just spreads it even thinner.

I strongly disagree that the audience for quality poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction is fixed; that hasn’t been my experience at all. This is just anecdotal evidence, of course, but I’ve been told more times than I can count that publications like qarrtsiluni and even Via Negativa have turned people on to poetry for the first time since they were in college. My hunch is that online literary magazines and blogs and their various hybrids are reaching a vast number of people who never read print literary magazines, whether through poverty (that’s been my excuse) or sheer ignorance of their existence. Not everyone lives near a large bookstore or university library, but anyone with a good dial-up connection can read literature for free online — and then have a conversation with other readers, and even with the author. The internet is not only bringing serious writing into people’s homes, it’s making it more down-home at the same time. And I believe it’s selling books. (It’s selling mine, at any rate.)

Curious, I click through to the Pleiades website, and experience the usual bafflement I feel with such magazines: like, where is it? I click on “Current Issue,” and there’s nothing but a photo of the cover and a list of the contents, no clickable links to any sample content, no links to authors’ websites, not even a goddamn link to order the issue online! What is the point of the webpage, then? My only option, apparently, is to subscribe to the journal. There’s a “Back Issues” page, but it too provides no clue about how to obtain the magazines displayed there. I feel like I’m peering into the window display of a closed bookstore, or perhaps a museum diorama.

Not all the literary magazines on show at the HuffPo are quite this clueless, though. I really hope the Pleiades editors read the comments from The Southern Review editor Jeann Leiby:

[O]ver the last two years, our subscription base has grown — not decreased. In large part, this is because of the internet and social networking websites. With the internet, it is easier — and less expensive — to advertise, to broaden our audience, and to entice people to The Southern Review’s printed pages. I’m not saying that I think online literary journals don’t have a place or are in any way lesser than print journals — only that the two things need not be mutually exclusive. I think there is audience enough for all of us.

Yes. Thank you!

Some of the points these editors make about the distracted nature of online reading strike me as quite valid, too, though there are various ways to get around that. They all seem pretty poorly informed about the variety of electronic, podcasting, and print-on-demand options available to them.

Take Richard Burgon of Boulevard magazine: “Literary journals (and books) offer the subtle pleasures of touch, portability and visibility — that strange delight their writers, and readers too, feel in seeing books physically exist in a bookstore or other public place — that the internet can’t yet duplicate” — as if “the internet” presented a monolithic reading experience, and were the only alternative to traditional print publication. What about the Kindle, for example, which Jeff Bezos insists will remain a reading-only device, one free of distractions from email and the web? I gather from those who own one that the reading experience is really quite comparable to a paperback book, with very little eye-strain. John Miedema — he of Slow Reading fame, as strong a critic of online reading habits as anyone you’ll find — has given it pretty good reviews:

For the most part, I felt like I was reading a book, only a bit slower. I suspect my base reading skills are being rewired just slightly, like the experience of seeing through a new pair of glasses. Sometimes I scan pages when I read, but on the Kindle I was forced to click ahead one page at a time, and could not easily jump back and forth over multiple pages. I would hate to cram a textbook this way. [...] After reading on the Kindle, I also read a print book and again found it a richer reading experience, but only marginally. In the future, I will make a point of distinguishing ebooks from ereaders. The Kindle and its competitors are not interesting because they mix digital technology with book content, i.e., ebooks; the computer did that. Ereaders are compelling because they merge digital technology with an acceptable physical interface for long-form reading.

The Huffington Post may or may not have the keys to the future of online journalism (and I know quite a few science bloggers who would choke at the suggestion), but if you’re looking for insights into the future of literary publishing, you’re better off reading real book bloggers like John.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Books and Music, Poets and poetry | Comments Off

Self-publishing poetry on the web: risks, benefits and best practices

Posted on December 12, 2010 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 16 of 23 in the series Poetics and technology

Last night on Facebook, Patricia Anderson messaged me on behalf of a friend of hers, a widely published poet “interested in hearing more about best practices, benefits and risks of putting one’s poetry online.” Although as a librarian Patricia knows way more than I do about social media, she thought I might be more familiar with online poetry communities. I’ll share an edited version of my response along with Patricia’s comments, and hope that some of you will add your own thoughts as well.

I began by saying that I don’t see any risk in putting already published poetry online, unless you want to maintain total control over its distribution: once in easily available digital form, it’s much easier for people to reproduce on blogs, message boards, etc. To me, this is a good thing, as long as people aren’t trying to claim your work for their own. It can expose you to a larger and more diverse audience than you can reach through books and journals alone. Having author-sanctioned or otherwise canonical versions of one’s work available at a site with good search-engine optimization is actually insurance against plagiarism, I think: that way, anyone Googling a text they’re suspicious of should discover the true author quickly. Also, posting your work at a site you control allows you to, for example, include a Creative Commons license that will permit its distribution with certain restrictions, depending on the license.

The only real risk of posting poems online is that it can render them ineligible for consideration at many if not most journals. Poets more ambitious about pursuing traditional publication than I am tend to either restrict themselves to posting poems that have already been published elsewhere, post drafts in password-protected blog entries that won’t be indexed by search engines, or post a draft for a day or two and then delete the entry.

The main benefit of posting original work online, I think, is the pleasure of getting to interact with a readership (which includes, but need not be limited to, other writers posting work on their own blogs). This interaction can blossom into a variety of collaborative projects and literary correspondences, too. I used to send stuff out to literary journals, but now the only way I publish elsewhere is if someone asks me for something (or just takes it, in accordance with the terms of my Creative Commons license). Over 500 people a day visit my site, which is kind of small potatoes in the blog world, but exceeds the circulation of many literary journals. So the only reason to send stuff out would be for prestige or promotion and tenure credits (which doesn’t affect me since I’m not in academia).

You mentioned best practices. I don’t know that there is one best way to do most things. For example, I strongly prefer to see texts in HTML on the open web instead of locked away in PDFs or other proprietary electronic formats, but I recognize that there are cases when the latter might be more appropriate.

Patricia responded:

Dave, by “best practices” I meant exactly the sorts of things you touched on here. Choosing a license, specifically one that requires attribution and prohibits modification [or better yet, one that allows it --Dave], finding a balance between protecting your work and broadening your audience, etc. I wasn’t thinking so much of technical matters, but you raise a good point about using blog format with HTML specifically to make them discoverable. If poems or art are online, but not able to be found in search engines, that kind of defeats the purpose.

In the library world, we have discovered to our surprise that making works available and discoverable online tends to DRASTICALLY increase the demand for the published printed works. People discover things online, and then decide they want a physical copy to have and to hold, or that they want to work with the poems in a more intimate way, or to research choices made in publication revealed through the printed page.

Dave, can you think of models of poets who have used the web to good effect for their own work, especially relatively well known poets? In science we are finding that the better known the researcher the less likely they are to make their work available in the Open Science models, but those who are willing to take the risk are achieving incredibly high profiles. Andrew Maynard is one who comes to mind, and Jean-Claude Bradley. I came into the Open Poetry movement through the back door, via Identi.ca and the huge movement for haiku in microblogging platforms, so have missed looking for “named” poets.

Hannah Stephenson, an emerging poet, uses blogging very well,
among many others I could name (check out my interview with her for the Woodrat Podcast). Hannah actively comments on a wide range of blogs — art blogs, psychology blogs, fashion blogs, etc. — and as a result has built up a readership of literate folks who are not necessarily all creative writers and poets. A number of poetry bloggers do fall into the trap of assuming that the only people who want to read and talk about poetry are other poets.

Established poets tend to be conservative and comfortable with what they know (like all of us), so no, I can’t think of any real good examples off-hand. Mark Doty has a really engaging personal blog, but doesn’t share poem drafts. Until recently, Bill Knott had all his work up on the web, but his irascible nature seemed to handicap his ability to get readers, or even very many links. Jerome Rothenberg definitely gets the value of blogs for self-publishing, though it’s not clear how many readers he has yet. In general, it’s the younger or more beginner poets of my acquaintance who are better at the social aspect of the web, and it will be interesting to see how their use of self-publishing tools changes as they become more established.

One practice that might bear more discussion is whether to publish on old-fashioned static websites (or static pages in a blog installation) or in serial form. I lean strongly toward the latter. One can use taxonomic systems to organize works released in blog form, and accumulate issues or anthologies in that manner even when the poems are scattered in among other material. Serializing content on a daily or weekly schedule makes it much more likely that one will get actual readers, and of course any modern content management system has feeds that can be used to create email subscriptions (a very effective way to reach people), auto-post to Facebook and Twitter, etc. It still astonishes me that most online literary magazines favor static content dumps over Poetry Daily-style regular releases, though I think I understand why they do it: desperate for respectability, they feel they must ape print journals as much as possible, and fear being dismissed as blog-zines or worse if they imitate the approach of nearly every other kind of web periodical.

Web publishers must come to terms with the fact that readers online tend to be more distracted than readers of dead-tree media, and have a greater tendency to skim. This, to me, is the big downside of the whole enterprise, and another argument for serialization versus content dumps. It also argues for multimedia, which is another whole discussion. Nothing like an audio player to lure visitors into slowing down and actively concentrating on the content! In fact, the ability to easy pair text with audio is a big advantage of the web over print. To say nothing of videopoetry… I gather from people who have tried them that some of the new e-readers are pretty easy on the eyes — “slow reading” expert John Miedema was very impressed by the Kindle last year. Even still, I don’t see books going away anytime soon, if ever (and neither does John, as a matter of fact). So I don’t see print and online publishing as competitors at all. The web appears to be actually enlarging the readership for poetry books.

Patricia replied:

I agree about “enlarging readership”. I was absolutely astonished to find that my two biggest fans on my poetry blog are a health care professional who writes about religion and an engineer. I also love people who do one-a-day or one-a-week. People actually queue up waiting for the next installment!

Media is also good, BUT it MUST be associated with actual words on a page, because of accessibility. Yes, the voice adds meaning for the blind, but it excludes the deaf.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Poets and poetry | 16 Comments

Blogging in English class

Posted on December 28, 2010 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 17 of 23 in the series Poetics and technology


Watch at YouTube.

If the writers’ workshop, popular at most colleges, married online technologies, and they had a ninth-grade daughter, it would be Mr. Stephens’s English class.

Thus begins this funky and wonderful video application to Google for some free Chrome OS notebook computers. “Mr. Stephens” is my friend and fellow blogging enthusiast Peter of Slow Reads, who two years ago guest-blogged a post for this series about teaching grammer on Twitter. (He now uses the Twitter-like microblog service for schools, Edmodo, instead.) The video mentions the multi-user blog community he set up using WordPress, inko.us, as well as a plethora of other websites and online applications he’s adapted for high school use.

But just as important as the online tools are the freedom Peter allows his students and the respect he shows them. “To the extent possible, I’d like to run the classroom like a writer’s workshop,” he says.

They are the writers. They make choices. The more I can treat them like writers, the more effective they’re gonna be as writers and the more love they’re gonna have as writers. If they are always told what to write, whom to write to, and what genre to write in, they’re not gonna feel like writers.

To me, blogging is all about exploring this kind of freedom, and I’m glad Peter is able to bring that into the normally restictive environment of a public school classroom. I’ve always admired his willingness to learn new technologies; as the first lines of the video suggest, I think he’s actually ahead of most university writing teachers in this regard. In his blog post about the application to Google, he mentions that he bought and learned how to use iMovie for the sole purpose of making this video — his first. Do watch it.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Poets and poetry, Video | 3 Comments

On Beyond Zebra: discovering @font-face

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 18 of 23 in the series Poetics and technology

On Beyond Zebra coverOn Beyond Zebra was always one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books: an alphabet of new, imaginary letters and the fabulous beasts whose names they were invented to spell. This week, I finally decided to figure out what this new-fangled @font-face CSS property for websites was all about, and I’m feeling very much as if the old alphabet has suddenly expanded into uncharted territory. If you’ve visited Via Negativa or any of its sister sites in the past few days, you might have noticed some of the results: a new header font here, a new header and description font at The Morning Porch, new headers and headings at Moving Poems and the Moving Poems forum blog, and a new base font at the Woodrat Photoblog.

You’re probably going to be seeing a lot more of this kind of experimentation around the web in the next few years. Here’s why. Until recently, web designers have been limited to a very small number of fonts that are compatible with all browsers, and a few of them, such as Comic Sans and Impact, kind of suck, which narrows the field even further. You can of course introduce fancy fonts in image form, but the problem with using images rather than text is that you are basically saying “fuck you” to the visually disabled, who rely on screen readers to access the web, as well as making yourself less visible to search engines. (I am continually baffled and irritated by literary magazines that use JPEGs for all or most of their textual content, but that’s a rant best saved for another time.)

The @font-face method is one solution that’s gained a lot of traction over the past year. Check out “The Essential Guide to @font-face” from Six Revisions, which I just discovered this evening (sure could have used it earlier in the week). As they explain, it’s not simply the CSS property itself, but a particular syntax for it that has enabled webmasters to overcome what might otherwise seem like a fairly daunting challenge: the fact that you have to reference four different font formats to accommodate all browsers.

Of course, we can’t possibly expect all the browsers to play nice and agree on a given solution! That would just be unreasonable.

Instead, all the major browsers have decided to go their own way with font formats that they choose to support.

  • Internet Explorer only supports EOT
  • Mozilla browsers support OTF and TTF
  • Safari and Opera support OTF, TTF and SVG
  • Chrome supports TTF and SVG.

Further, mobile browsers like Safari on the iPad and iPhone require SVG.

If this is beginning to sound like a huge pain in the ass, relax and do what I did at first: head over to Google Web Fonts. Google takes care of all the complicated stuff for you, and using one of their free fonts reduces the load on your server compared to uploading the font files to your website. To experiment with it, stick the line of code they supply for your chosen font in the head portion of your site, and substitute the name of the font for whatever you want to try replacing in your stylesheet. If you’re the cautious sort of person who likes to read a tutorial first, another one from Six Revisions, “A Guide to Google Font API,” covers all the essential points in a little more detail than Google’s own introduction.

If you’re on WordPress.com, by the way, I believe you can only use Google web fonts with the paid CSS upgrade at this point. Although you don’t have access to your theme’s header file, you can put something like
@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=theme+name);
in your stylesheet and achieve the same effect. Or you can use Typekit via the link-up provided in your site’s dashboard. They do have a few free options, I gather, but for the most part they’re a paid service with annual fees to use proprietary fonts. Which kind of takes all the fun of it, in my opinion.

According to Six Revisions, “The Google Fonts API … neglects to include an SVG version so there is currently no support for mobile devices.” I don’t know that I’m hugely concerned whether people accessing my sites on small screens have access to prettier typography; the fall-back fonts ought to do well enough. However, Google web fonts are still fairly limited in number, so I do recommend checking out the much larger trove of free fonts at Font Squirrel as well. (Thanks to Elizabeth Enslin for tipping me off about them earlier this week.) I used their kit for a public-domain font called Goudy Bookletter 1911 over at the photoblog this afternoon, and the process was painless: just a little more code to paste into the stylesheet, and some files to upload to my WordPress theme folder.

In each case, of course, introducing a new font has prompted me to tinker with the design as well. While this hasn’t resulted in any major changes at this blog yet, it did result in, I think, some dramatic improvements at the Moving Poems sites, where I may end up not keeping that crazy header font — Slackey, by Sideshow — but feel kind of fond of it now, since it was my very first experiment with this new approach to web fonts.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, self-publishing is a habit that started when I was a kid, and my brothers and I put out a quarterly nature magazine. We were part of the Xerox revolution, boys and girls, and it was totally analog! Our articles were typed, we drew the illustrations in pen and ink, and I taught myself calligraphy to do the article headings. Despite devouring a pile of books on calligraphy and type, however, I didn’t keep up with the hobby, and for a number of years in my 20s, virtually the only fonts I composed in were whatever monospaced monstrosities WordPerfect used pre-6.0. MS Word was a huge improvement, with dozens of fonts to choose from. Going from Word to the web, with just a handful of usable fonts, seemed like a step backwards. To this day, there’s a great sameness to the way the web looks, even outside the padded cells of Facebook. But if this @font-face method catches on the way I think it will, the web is about to become a lot more eccentric and diverse.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | Tagged | 2 Comments

On translating poetry into bloggish

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 19 of 23 in the series Poetics and technology

I’m not a real translator, but I play one on my blog. I don’t know the languages I translate from — Spanish, Japanese, Chinese — at all well, and I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable with sending my translations out for publication elsewhere, but I have no qualms about posting them here (and occasionally at Moving Poems), and in fact treat such posting as part of the process. Some of my readers have native fluency in the languages I translate from, and will let me know if I’ve messed something up, especially if I include or link to the original. Others are learners like me, and enjoy putting an oar in on occasion. Plus, anyone with a good ear for poetry in English is qualified to critique a translation to some extent, I think. I am pretty confident that Edward Snow is Rilke’s greatest English translator ever, for example, even though I don’t know a lick of German — his translations just feel right. And I am equally confident that some perfectly fine poets fall short as translators because, no matter the language they’re working with, their translations always sound exactly like their own poems.

Several times I have solicited feedback on difficult phrases, sparking interesting and useful discussions, both here and on Facebook. Last June, for example, I asked for help with a line from a poem by Jorge Tellier, and the responses from people with better Spanish than me was sufficiently contradictory that in the end the arbitrariness of my choice was scarcely diminished — but it was a much better informed choice than it otherwise would have been. In December 2009, my posting of some annotated translations of Buson’s haiku elicited, among other things, a helpful response from a Dutch translator (and Twitter contact) who had written an entire essay about one of the poems discussed. Back when Via Negativa was still on Blogger, a lengthy exchange with an Indian student of classical Japanese (subsequently lost — curse you, Haloscan!) helped me whip my translations of tanka by Izumi Skikibu into shape. Which was a good thing, since that post has drawn a lot of search-engine traffic over the years. Such crowd-sourced collaboration is of course one of the great distinguishing features of literature on the web, and it’s a source of conviviality and delight.

Including the original texts sometimes involves copyright violation, but since this is a “just” a blog and I can take down anything right away if the current copyright holder complains, I don’t feel I need to go through the hassle of trying to track down said copyright holders to gain permission. A strict interpretation of international copyright law would also deem the translations themselves to be in violation, as derivative works, but I tend to agree with the spirit of “fair use” in U.S. copyright law that holds that a sufficiently creative transformation of source material shouldn’t require special permission. Still, as managaing editor for qarrtsiluni, I felt we had to take quite a stricter line for submissions to our current Translation issue. And I got to see first-hand how hard it can be to locate copyright holders for works whose authors have died more recently than 70 years ago (the point at which they enter the public domain).

Online dictionaries are one of the greatest things on the web, right up there with Google and blogging, and when you’re a dilettante translator whose knowledge of the source language barely covers the grammar and a basic vocabulary, good dictionaries are a must. Nor is it only foreign-language dictionaries I depend on; English dictionaries with lots of synonyms and/or online thesauruses are also helpful in grinding out translations quickly enough to satisfy the ever-voracious blog. Translating a poem is just like writing an original poem, only more so: that constant groping for just the right word is rendered all the more acute by the need to stay faithful to a template. And with a closely related language like Spanish, one has to constantly struggle against the impulse to use the cognate, or the first word given by the bilingual dictionary (which often is the cognate). Plus, I like to search for other translations online and see what they’ve done — knowing that this will put even more pressure on me to come up with something original.

Note by the way that “original” doesn’t necessarily mean “unique.” Often the best choice, or at least one of the best choices, will indeed turn out to be the most obvious one, but that decision should only be arrived at through struggle. This is what originality means for a writer: to dive down to the origins of language and meaning as often as possible.

This kind of part-time, half-serious translating for the blog may seem irresponsible, but for me, it’s a way of paying homage to literary heroes and sharing my enthusiasm for their work — and what is blogging about if not the sharing of enthusiasms? Sometimes it takes a more serious cast: when Hondurans were fighting against a coup government in the summer of 2009, I blogged a six-part series of Honduran poetry, trying to show how some of the country’s leading writers have perceived its political, social and economic situation over the decades with poems by Oscar Acosta, Roberto Sosa, Clementina Suarez and others. One of my more astute readers responded: “Thanks for dwelling with Honduras. There seems to be some glare at this time that keeps me from seeing too far into the poems, but still I get a feeling of being somehow present in that landscape where I’ve scarcely, but memorably, been.” I’d like to think I got beneath the surface of two or three of the 16 poems I translated for the series, but in general, yes — I’m afraid there was a bit of surface glare.

If I did know the source languages well, would I still feel compelled to attempt translations? I am far from the first poet to treat translation as a species of decipherment. And I’ve been assured by a few professional translators that there’s nothing wrong with this, that it’s considered perfectly respectable within their discipline. That’s all to the good, I suppose. But I am still going to self-identify as an apprentice translator, because translating poetry for me is very much an act of apprenticeship: I want to study how master poets have played with language and meaning. I want to practice slow reading of the most deliberate kind.

In general, as a writer, I try and work on cultivating a better quality of attention to the world around me, and translating helps me do that. We flatter ourselves that we understand a little about the inner workings of the universe, but every day brings news of fresh discoveries from biologists and physicists that turn accepted ideas on their head. And if even the scientists don’t know what’s going on, where does that leave the rest of us, who probably can’t identify half the species in our own back yards, let alone begin to untangle their relationships? To say nothing of the mysteries of human nature and society.

So in a very real sense, every act of writing is an act of translation, and every honest effort to translate involves “going to the pine,” to paraphrase Basho. How can I translate another’s words when I have yet to interpret my own? For example, I have been writing about darkness forever, but just yesterday an online friend from the city on his first writers’ retreat deep in the country marveled: it’s dark here! I was struck by the realization that although we’ve been in conversation for severn years and have talked about concepts of light and darkness more than once, he and I have had very different ideas about this word “darkness” all that time.

Languages too are full of mysteries. I’ve done just enough translating to experience the rare joy of a serendipitous echo across the gulf between languages — a kind of discovery hardly differing from those one makes when writing one’s own poem and suddenly learning what it is one really thinks or feels. There’s more than one way to rescue something from that great blankness beyond language. Everyone talks about what’s lost in translation, but you rarely hear about the found things, which are of course equally numerous. Regular readers may recall this list of things I’ve found in one sort of translation or another:

  • The steam that rises from a slaughtered hog on a cool morning in October, mingling with our breath.
  • The missing links from a game of Chinese whispers, complete with shrugs.
  • A hole in the wall just big enough for an empty hand, a hand without a fist in it.
  • A spotted feather dropped by a striped bird.
  • The tribal woman pressing her face into the anthropologist’s wet clay, then raising her head and laughing, so that flakes of clay fly off.
  • A formula for silence that doesn’t involve wind or distance.
  • The reptile claws of ferns before there were fiddles.
  • The self-censorship of clouds on a clear day.
  • Tears of a potato rendered chemically unable to sprout.
  • A nest of spray cans under the railroad trestle and the deep-sea visions of those who used them in lieu of oxygen.
  • The royal carpet a thistle extends to bees.
  • The silver hair of water going over the concrete spillway that no one stops to look at on their way to the pig roast.
  • Young thrushes practicing their song over the noise of the mining trucks, perched in the shadow of the disappeared mountain.
  • A stranger’s finger on your face, causing you to forget your own name for a few seconds.
  • Foghorns and their incidental summons to a new life.

Of course I blogged this as if it were a poem, as if it were something original to me. The comments were forgiving: “A waking dream,” offered one. Yes, that too. Such imprecision would doubtless make a professional translator balk.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Greatest Hits, Poets and poetry | 24 Comments

House of Wordiness: my nearly endless interview at the Palace

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 21 of 23 in the series Poetics and technology

At her blog The Palace at 2:00 a.m., Marly Youmans has an on-going series of interviews with writers and publishers called The House of Words. One afternoon last February, I sat down and wrote a few thousand words in response to a series of questions she sent me, and promptly forgot about it until a couple months later when the first installment appeared (#20 in the series). Marly posted a few installments, illustrated with photos she found at Via Negativa, then went on vacation for a month… in the midst of which, somewhat surreally, she and I actually met up in Wales. This was the very first time we met, despite the fact that we’ve known each other for several years and are only about a five-hour drive apart over some of the most lovingly maintained highways in the world. Anyway, the interview finally resumed in the third week of May, and just concluded a few days ago. Here are the links to the pieces in order, with a brief quote from each to give you a flavor. If you have comments on specific points I raise in the series, please leave them at Marly’s blog rather than here so as to keep the discussion in one place.

Part 1
Friends started telling me about Blogger that summer, but like most literary snobs I turned my nose up at it, both because of the absurd and ugly word, “blog,” and also because of what I was hearing about blogs in the mainstream media: that they were filled with worthless minutiae of people’s daily lives and/or links accompanied by minimal, uninformed comments. It didn’t seem at all attractive.

Part 2
I’ve come to feel that blogging and poetry writing are an ideal match, at least for those of us who are shameless enough to share imperfect drafts with the world.

Part 3
The push to come up with new content every day was transformative.

Part 4
I feel like a bit of a hypocrite: I run an online journal, but almost never submit my own work to journals unless invited. But mostly that’s because very few journals consider previously blogged material, and I write first and foremost to feed the blog.

Part 5
In general, I think the best medicine for discouragement [at not getting published] is to join a community of writers, online or in real life, and focus on the writing rather than the writer.

Part 6
There are just so many opportunities for collaboration now — I don’t see how any serious writer can fail to be excited by that.

Part 7
Generations of poets have been taught to be absolute perfectionists and struggle against every word, because we all know how mortifying it is to have to look at a poem in print that we’ve long since revised. Being mainly self-published and mainly online does allow for a more fluid conception of one’s work.

Part 8
It gradually turned into a regular magazine, though we’ve never gone so far as to issue periodic issue-dumps, as other online magazines do, preferring instead to remain bloggish, with new material at least five times a week, and comments activated for every post.

Part 9
I fear a lot of people start blogs these days on the advice of editors or agents who neglect to tell them that the most important trait of a good blogger is generosity.

Jack-in-the-boxwood, Wales (photo by Marly)

Jack-in-the-boxwood, Wales (photo by Marly--click on the photo to visit her post)

Marly Youmans and Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Marly Youmans and Clive Hicks-Jenkins take a spin through the art gallery

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Poets and poetry | 4 Comments

At play in the fields of Google

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 22 of 23 in the series Poetics and technology

UPDATE (9/1/11): I’ve decided to end my use of Google+ due to Google’s intransigence over its identity policy. One Facebook is enough! See you over at the other corporate soul-stealer.

Cory Doctorow sums up the issues better than I could.

*

So I’ve joined Google+, the fantastic new social network for talking about Google+. (It’s still in private beta, but I have invitations if anyone wants one.) Enthusiasm for the still-developing service has been balanced by skepticism that we actually need another general-purpose social network — see for example what Lorianne DiSabato and Beth Adams have blogged about it. Here are my initial reactions.

1) Facebook has had a “lists” feature for quite some time, supposedly allowing one to keep up with subsets of one’s contacts — family, close friends, blogger buddies, etc. Unfortunately, it never shows me more than the most recent day or two of posts from the lists I’ve set up, and even then doesn’t seem to include everything. Facebook is good at suggesting people I should add to each semi-functional list, which makes me suspect it’s really all about data-mining with advertisers in mind: figure out how specifically we network so they can better target us in coordinated advertising campaigns. Now, there’s no guarantee that Google+’s ballyhooed “circles” won’t have the same ultimate purpose. But the interface for screening one’s data-stream by subset of contacts is much smoother, it’s not three clicks away, and (so far at least) it works.

2) Data portability is a critical issue for me. Google+ lets you download and save all your posts at any time. I like that. Despite my very liberal views on copyright and content-sharing, I don’t like the feeling I get over at Facebook that my content isn’t really my own.

3) Much as I like the 140-character limit at Twitter and Identi.ca as an enforcer of concision and spur to creativity for my microblogging at The Morning Porch, I don’t otherwise see the point, and I resent Facebook limiting the length of status updates. Google+ lets you go on as long as you like. It’s bloggish.

4) While it would be nice to have a “Facebook for grown-ups,” and I’ll be happy if Google+ becomes that and gets mass adoption, at this point I’m most interested in social networking around specific interests or for specific purposes. (Just look at the success of Goodreads among book-readers and Ravelry among knitters.) It’s not clear to me yet whether Google+, with its circles and video-chat “hangouts,” represents a major step forward in this regard. I am considering getting a webcam, though — the possibilities for small-group readings and workshops are very tantalizing. I’ve always hesitated to organize conference calls on Skype due to the sometimes intermittent nature of our internet connection here; far better if it were hosted in the cloud, as Google+ hangouts are. Also, spontaneous get-togethers are often the best kind, and creative types in particular are hard to herd, as would be necessary if I ever tried the Skype approach.

5) Like Beth and Lorianne, I’m a blogger first and foremost. I think that anyone who really has anything to say on a regular basis should have their own blog, and that we should preferentially leave comments about blog posts at the point of origin and stop letting discussions fragment and dissipate at a half-dozen different places where the link might be shared.

6) A link-sharing culture, regardless of its host (Google+, Reddit, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, etc.) is fundamentally about enthusiasm for things that others have written, captured or made. This is both good and bad. I like the enthusiasm (and the frequent displays of wit), but I get frustrated after a while and want to say, O.K., but what have you made? Where are your poems? Hang out too much with professional writers or artists, though, and you’ll notice that we tend to go in the opposite direction, rarely sharing anything we didn’t make ourselves. Is it possible that our participation in social networks has helped mitigate this tendency a little? Or for those of us who were already blogging before Facebook and Twitter got big, has it actually shrunk our blogs, diminishing the emphasis we once placed on linking out, assembling sidebar linkrolls, and being social, because hey, we’re doing enough of that elsewhere? Self-centered and often anti-social as I am, I do try to strike a balance between self-promotion and other-promotion, but it’s not always easy. I like to think my use of Facebook has forced me to at least stay focused on the problem.

7) Email is still the “killer app” for me and I think for almost everyone over the age of 30. Unlike phone calls or (god help us) instant messaging, it doesn’t interrupt whatever I’m doing and destroy my concentration. We need less distraction, not more. What keeps me involved in online social interactions are email notifications, and the more customizable those notifications are, the happier I am. Facebook has recently gotten pretty good in this regard, letting me decide on a page-by-page and group-by-group basis how I want to be notified. It would be nice if I could do this for each comment thread as well, because some discussions you really want to follow and others, not so much. (I’ve seen participants in Facebook conversations go back and delete their comments just to stop the flood of notifications when the conversation goes on too long!)

It is in this regard that the older blogging platforms are really falling behind WordPress. I’m much less likely to leave a comment anymore if can’t keep track of follow-up discussion via email. I’ll actually be surprised if Blogger doesn’t overhaul its archaic commenting system soon, and introduce a “subscribe to other comments in this thread” feature when it does so. Typepad is probably a lost cause. (Incidentally, for self-hosted WordPress bloggers, I recommend the plugin I’m using, Subscribe to Comments Reloaded, rather than the original Subscribe to Comments, which hasn’t been updated since 2007. Previously I used a different plugin with a double opt-in feature — in other words, the subscriber had to not only check a box, but reply to an email in order to confirm each and every subscription. That’s too many hoops to jump through, I think.)

The point is that for me and I presume most other email-oriented people who want to participate in online conversations, it’s important that we have the option to follow discussions via email — and that we have fine-grained controls, including the option to unsubscribe from any discussion at any time. WordPress.com currently leads the social media field in this regard, which may seem ironic, since WordPress is all about traditional, long-form blogging and website creation rather than social networking. The highlight of the latest version of the software is a distraction-free writing option, which shows what the developers prioritize. At the same time, they have more — and, I gather, better — mobile phone applications than any other blogging platform. But I think it only makes sense that those who most value thoughtful communication would build the best tools for discussion and response.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | Tagged , | 26 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
Page 2 of 212