I didn’t have the name for it
in English: lumpy fruit soft
as thin leather, knobbed with
the biggest outie I’d ever seen.
She took it back, sliced it in half,
& handed me one of the hemispheres
together with a Western spoon. Kezuro wa ne, oishii desu yo,
she said, speaking slow & smiling
as if to a child. That first seedy,
pulpy spoonful tasted like
it could have been any fruit.
I remember the brush of her fingers
on mine, & how it suddenly became
difficult to meet her gaze.
I placed the empty skin cup
upside-down on the table & fumbled
for my dictionary. Pomegranate,
I said, handing it over with my finger
on the word. Her brows knit
as she sampled the unfamiliar syllables.
I still have it, that little red dictionary
bound in thin fake leather.
At Read Write Poem, Dana Guthrie Martin has interviewed Beth Adams and me about our experiences publishing a chapbook — check it out. As with our live podcasts at qarrtsiluni, we seem to fall naturally into roles quite analogous to those of sports commentators on the radio: Beth calls the plays, and I provide the color commentary.
Speaking of Dana Guthrie Martin, last night I stayed up much too late reading the final, “curated” version of the inaugural issue of Mutating the Signature, a new and very innovative online literary magazine spun off from a qarrtsiluni issue of the same name. The inaugural issue is the work of Dana and her usual writing partner (and qarrtsiluni co-editor) Nathan Moore, writing in collaboration as described on the About page:
Mutating the Signature is a place for two poets — or one poet and one artist of any type — to work and write to, for and with one another as creators and curators of an issue of the journal.
Curators will select a theme to work with for the duration of their issue. Each issue will unfold over the course of one to three months, depending on how long it takes for the curators to fully explore their topic and the issue they are creating.
Curators are encouraged to “talk” to one another not only with poetry but with prose, artwork, music, photography, and other means of communication and expression, and to explore fully the possibilities of the online journal space. Each piece shared will contribute to illustrating, furthering and even complicating their issue’s theme, whatever that may be, wherever that may go.
Since this is kind of a new concept in literary periodical publishing — to put it mildly — Dana and Nathan decided to go first and show what was possible. The result is Untelling Stories, a very satisfying, nicely designed PDF book of 86 pages. It is by turns earthy and cerebral, and despite watching it unfold in draft form on the website, in many cases I had trouble telling who wrote what — that’s how well-matched their styles are. I was surprised to find a quote from yours truly as an epigraph at the front of the book, but that was minor compared to my surprise and pleasure at how well all the disparate parts fit together: paintings, diagrams, lists, B.S., and of course poetry, ranging from the lyrical to the postmodern.
Perhaps my favorite thing about it is how many incantations it includes — artful repetition can make even the driest of material come alive. And there is plenty of material here that could’ve become dry as dust in the wrong hands: as the title suggests, Untelling Stories confronts the human preoccupation with narrative head-on, kind of like the Talking Heads with Stop Making Sense, but employing less obvious rhythms. The writing process included exercises in which the same words and phrases were reused in different forms, which provides refrain-like motifs and helps knit the book together. There are a few parts I don’t get, but they are vastly outnumbered by images that astonish and lines that delight. Overall, Untelling Stories tastes like a small cosmic soup, wholesome and warming and full of strangeness:
A delicate rumor of dust coagulates on the table.
Love is acoustic tile where there should be sky.
His beliefs can be reduced to a single gesture.
The dog forgets/ our tension and the dead don’t believe we exist.
Shoelaces untied, you stumble through the exit./ You haven’t spoken to yourself in weeks.
Every mistaken month needs a sudden exit
Thou, in whose fields I dangle origami birds.
Who holds a lover like a can of Crisco.
What grows three heads then decides which will live.
They brought an exit wound. They brought an evolving gill slit. They brought the early morning raid.
Infiltrated by tiny legs of printed letters.
Can you see why I was flattered to have some words of my own added to this highly quotable mix? It’s amazing that Dana and Nathan managed to write this entire collection in just two months. I worry that they may have set the bar too high for those who will follow, but the next two authors, Emily Van Duyne and W.F. Roby, should be up to the challenge. Their theme is Ante/Anti, and they start tomorrow. I’ll be reading.
A distillation and clarification of last night’s response to the RWP prompt. Now I think I’m getting somewhere.
Oh rare & wild ear, translate these nuggets of noise until they gleam. I am too restless with desire’s ever-shifting surfaces to coalesce around a single planet or communion cup. I hear the ticking in a slab of meat, the crackling of an old 78 record pitted with meteorites of dust. A bird lisps its satisfaction in a minor key & I hear a spare sorrow, a sparrow’s grief. Ear like the ornate lip of a jar, part human, part gyroscope: no matter how I turn, you keep me from falling. Bare twigs of synapses light up until the whole gray cage is aglow, some autumn morning.
Oh rare & wild ear, translate until bright
my rival making, my restlessness.
The river bears thousands of planets
& the church lifts an elliptical wine,
reminding us of lust on old records.
Up, bird! Bring pieces of ticking meat,
traumatic presents to fill with our losses.
Carry an uncanny whisk-broom,
utter sparse desires, jump.
Time extends beyond the ornate
lip & jar. One turns, wants, composes,
part human, part gyroscope,
raw twigs exposed together.
The ear spans ignored masters
& incorporates sheer guises of a cage.
*
For a Read Write Poem prompt, using the cut-up technique. I dug out a Copper Canyon Press catalog (Spring/Summer 2009) and took a few words from each of the book blurbs, none from the poems themselves. I used the list randomizer at Random.org to shuffle them into a new order, arranged them into lines of 4-6 words for easy viewing, and then did the bare minimum of rearranging, addition and subtraction necessary to make some kind of coherent sense out of the whole. What does the poem mean? Hell if I know. But there are a couple of phrases I might be able to use in more coherent contexts, I think.
You can have everything as long as you keep your eyes shut. I’ve been practicing this with horses, with hats, with consumer electronics, with money, with vacations, with specialty cheeses, with weapons of mass destruction. I hear them gather, humming & purposeful, like sex toys or the avatars of deities in which I don’t fully believe.
I start the way an oyster does, mulling over a mustard seed of lust. But it isn’t a seed, is it? It’s a worry bead, a tumor: its growth is by simple addition, & contains no taint of metamorphosis. I conjure, I cadger, I cajole these prodigies of the pituitary gland into being my body doubles & starring in the movie of my life while I sleep.
Underneath the spoon’s
small lake of chowder
she fears her face
is still staring back,
upside-down, like
some girl in China,
& depending on the angle,
either outlandishly skinny
or outlandishly fat.
She shuts her eyes
& quickly shoves it in.
“Delicious, isn’t it?”
her mother smiles
from the other side of
their round, round table.
__________
In response to a word prompt at Read Write Poem (from which I used only the first word, “spoon”). Read the other responses here.
This lacewing may be experiencing a teachable moment. I know I was: up late dreading poetry, I suddenly realized I was dreading over someone else’s shoulder. It must’ve come in through a hole in the screen door, and perhaps thought — erroneously, of course — that the computer screen was another way out.
Green lacewings are as sensitive as they look. Their hearing is so acute that some species can even pick up bats’ sonar, whereupon they fold their wings and plummet to the ground to avoid capture. They communicate through subtle vibrations of the body, especially during courtship — inaudible “songs” unique to each species.
This was not always such a sensitive being, though. In its wild youth as an aphid-lion it ate any soft-bodied invertebrate in its path, and was even capable of resorting to cannibalism if no other food was handy. It had large sucking jaws with which to grasp its prey and inject stomach acid, turning the other’s insides into a Slurpee.
If you too are up late tonight, you might still have time to confess your poetic sins before “100% Honest Day” is over at Read Write Poem. Here’s what I wrote:
I have a deep-seated fear of unconscious plagiarism, to the point where I even suspect all my best lines and images to be stolen from someone else. One of the main reasons for my lack of enthusism for publishing my work anywhere other than my own blog is the fear that someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of modern poetry will discover my unwitting thefts. And even if I could know for sure that all my works are original, I would probably continue to feel at some level that I am an utter fraud as a poet. (I wonder if this is why so many of my fellow poets get MFAs?)
If I want to overcome this fear, I think I simply need to retrain my ears. Surely it can’t be too difficult to learn to distinguish one’s own unique vibrations from anybody else’s. My aphid-lion days are, after all, well behind me now.
From the first fist into
the risen mass, the dough
is a-hiss. To live is
to master a liturgy
of winds — even yeast
knows this. Gas
whispers out through
a thousand pinholes as
I fold & press, fold
& press that limit-
less quilt.
*
Written for the RWP vowel prompt. Other responses may be found here.
Photo by nimrodcooper (click through to read the fascinating, eerie story behind the picture)
Found poem consisting of excerpts from an article in the Pennsylvania
Game News, June 2009, by James J. Corsetti Jr.
Hunting crows is somewhat of a relic from the past.
Old-times would cruise around the backroads
With a rifle behind the seat
And take out any crows they came across.
Folks would use the .22 Hornet, .220 Swift, .22-250,
And many others to take crows at 100 to 300 yards
Taking a target smaller than your fist.
I don’t know of anyone these days who uses
A rifle for crows.
Crow hunting here is a shotgun game.
Crows can be quite fast
And can spin on a dime in the air
And put themselves out of range in a hurry.
Use either a modified or full choke.
These birds rarely come in real close like doves or ducks,
So you need to reach out and touch them.
One time they kept flying back and forth
Over my stand despite being shot at,
They kept coming back.
I use dead crows as decoys, which works well.
I place the dead crows in trees or in the open.
I have done well with my mouth crow calls,
And no calls sound the same.
I can react to their calling
And be as aggressive as possible
Or a little coy.
It is one of the few animals
You can hunt on Sundays.
No one I know has ever eaten them.
I have used their feathers for fly tying,
I have used them for my trapline.
I breast them out like I do my doves
And use them for bait.
This winter, when you’re sitting next to the fireplace,
Bored out of your mind, think of crows.
Assembled for the Found Poetry group forum at Read Write Poem. I believe this creative re-purposing qualifies as Fair Use under U.S. copyright law. The photo is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.
From time to time, I motivate myself to do a translation of a Spanish-language video poem for Moving Poems. This morning’s effort was for an adaptation of a couple of pieces by Alejandra Pizarnik done in the style of a classic black-and-white horror film. Check it out.
I’ve been a little surprised to find myself so active there; up until now, I’ve actively avoided involvement in discussions about writing and literature, which so easily become contentious. But so far, at least, the dominant tone at Read Write Poem has been enthusiasm rather than snark. And in another test of the expanded site’s success, the responses to the first weekly poetry prompt since the changeover have included a number of pretty impressive poems. I may never become a regular writer to prompts myself, but it’s great to see so many talented writers coming together across boundaries of distance, background, level of expertise, and stylistic approach. If you were thinking of applying for an MFA program somewhere, I’d advise you to save your money and join Read Write Poem instead.
Back when I started this series, Dana Guthrie Martin volunteered to do a piece about sharing poetry on Facebook. Obviously she has yet to produce such an article. But instead, with the help of several friends, she’s done something far cooler: launch a Facebook alternative for poets and fans of poetry. I was one of about 15 testers for the site, which opened to the public at large yesterday: the new Read Write Poem. And based on what I’ve seen so far, I’d say there’s a good chance it will be a runaway success.
Up until Thursday, Read Write Poem had been a simple multi-author blog and weekly poetry prompt site, started by Dana in 2007 and managed for a year and a half by Deb Scott, who stays on as a member of the new managerial team. The prompts will continue, along with other great content and spin-offs, such as virtual book tours on members’ blogs and a podcast. (I’ve even volunteered to write a monthly column on topics similar to the ones I address in this series. We’re calling it “O Tech!”) But it’s the new back-end that really sets it apart.
Read Write Poem now runs on WordPress MU, the multi-user version of the blog platform, in order to take advantage of BuddyPress, “a suite of WordPress plugins and themes” designed “to let members socially interact.” BuddyPress is an official project of Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com who also comprise most of the lead developers for the open-source Wordpress software, so it’s almost a sure bet that it will be around as long as WordPress itself. Dana and her technology guru Andre Tan looked at some other alternatives, such as Ning and Elgg, but ultimately decided that a BuddyPress set-up had the most flexibility for the kind of dual-purpose site they wanted. The website content is still at the front, as you’ll see, with the social network accessible via a new navigation bar at the top. The latest content from the network appears in the right-hand sidebar to help lure people in.
To me, this is a better approach than the usual social network style, which is to have one’s own activity stream take over for the index page as soon as one is logged in. I noticed that when I went to add a link to my browser bookmark bar yesterday, without really thinking about it I chose to bookmark the front page rather than my own profile page. I guess I like the tacit reminder that the site is about something bigger than just me and my network of friends and acquaintances. Facebook is still valuable because it lets me connect with virtually everyone and do some of the silly stuff I’ve never done much of at Via Negativa, such as pontificate about favorite music videos or participate in so-called memes. I can share links to poetry-related things (or whatever) with a much broader cross-section of people than just poets. But I’ve been using Facebook to connect with literary folks for close to two years now, and I can tell you that, for whatever reason, deep discussions rarely happen there. Almost all the groups I’ve joined are ghost towns — albeit ones that send out regular mailings to their members.
How does Read Write Poem compare with Facebook? The most glaring difference is the lack of a unified activity stream where I can follow all my friends’ posts to their profile pages — the equivalent of what Facebook calls status updates — in one place. Your only option for following friends at this time, short of visiting all their profiles, is to subscribe to their RSS feeds. And since most web users are unfortunately still in the dark about RSS, that’s not too good a solution. Though it’s somewhat hard to find at the moment, it turns out that there is a stream of one’s friends’ activity, similar to what’s in Facebook. Click on the “activity” link directly under the avatar on your personal page (I had thought that was merely an RSS feed link), and you can toggle between “just me” and “my friends” — and subscribe to either. [Thanks to Andre for the correction -- see comments]
On the other hand Moreover, thanks to BuddyPress, Read Write Poem now has something that Facebook does not: forums. Some of these are free-standing and others are associated with groups. And if the last day and a half are any indication, the groups and forums are going to be the most active part of the site — which I feel is how it should be. Like a lot of writers and artists, I guess, I’m not a highly social person in real life because I’m not all that good at idle chit-chat, and because I’m rather zealously protective of my free time. Facebook, Twitter, etc. are fun, but what ultimately is the point? To me, the most interesting online social networks are those centered on specific hobbies or interests, such as Ravelry for knitters, Flickr for photographers, or Goodreads for book lovers. Long after Twitter and Facebook have lost their faddish appeal, people will still be trading knitting tips on Ravelry.
Then there’s the blogging connection. I’ve always been impressed by the way that the blogosphere can bring together like-minded people, and as a writing prompt site for bloggers, Read Write Poem has been helping to build such informal networks for a while now. I’ll be interested to see whether more people feel encouraged to start blogs as a result of membership in the new site. I saw one example of that yesterday, and another new member say that she had joined in part to try and work her way up to blogging. Since Read Write Poem retains a focus on weekly group writing exercises posted to members’ own blogs, there should be considerable peer pressure on non-blogging members to start blogs.
If so, it will be very positive outcome — and will further differentiate RWP from Facebook, where people are encouraged to upload photos and compose lengthy notes on-site. One result is that Facebook ends up with too much power over your content, and if your account gets suspended for some reason, you lose it. Dana and her co-conspirators have wisely decided not to try and turn Read Write Poem into a hosted blogging platform at this time, even though that is what WordPress-MU was designed for. It would mean a lot more time, money, hassle, and responsibility, and it’s not as if plenty of good blog hosting options don’t already exist. Still, it’s nice to have the freedom to spin off a few more blogs any time they feel the need without having to set up a new database with a fresh Wordpress install, as would otherwise be the case. I gather they may do this down the road if the need arises for more narrowly targeted sub-sites.
So far BuddyPress has proved fairly intuitive to use — much more so than Facebook, for example. A few things still frustrate me, such as the lack of nesting throughout the network: whether in my personal news feed, a group “wire,” or a forum topic, I can’t reply to an earlier post in a thread and start a new branch, which seems to me a pretty basic need for a social network — even Identi.ca has that now (though Twitter and Facebook still don’t). I also don’t like the lack of RSS feeds or other opt-in subscription options for conversations. BuddyPress does offer group administrators the option to have members notified every time someone posts something, as happens on Facebook with every discussion in which one participates. But there’s no way for members to opt out, so none of the groups I’ve joined so far have enabled the feature. You can’t assume that everyone wants to get that much email.
Some people might be bothered by the lack of provision for private profiles, but for this kind of network I’m not sure there’d be any point in that. There are provisions for private, invitation-only groups, as well as for completely hidden groups, which should prove important for people who want to share poems and get critiques from just a few trusted friends.
Building a social network for poets is a risky business: we’re a notoriously fractious bunch. The managers have posted a code of conduct which contains a helpful list of “do’s,” such as:
Have fun (not “poke-the-skinny-kid-on-the-playground” fun, but “find-joy-in-expressing-yourself-and-reading-the-work-of-others” fun).
Make everyone feel safe and welcome.
Be generous with your enthusiasm and encouragement. And sincere. Always sincere.
Be respectful in comments sections on this site and on members’ sites. (In other words, our interactions are electronic dialogues; don’t spit on anyone or pull their hair.)
If most members follow these rules, and moderators and community managers are prompt in barring flagrant violators, it could turn into a really interesting place. In addition to Dana, Andre, and Deb, Nathan Moore and Dave Jarecki have also contributed considerable energy to building the site, and it appears to be a really active team overall. So far, the level of general excitement is high and discussions have taken off at many of the groups. The trouble is, I may have a hard time now going anywhere else! Though Dana & Co. may have thought they were creating a Facebook for poets, I fear that what they’ve actually created is flypaper for poets. You can hear the buzz from here.
Although I’ve experimented with video poems before, this is the first one where I relied on audio for the text rather than superimposing the words on the screen. The footage was all shot this past Sunday, at the top of our field (which is also the top of the Plummer’s Hollow watershed). My friends Chris and Seung had come up from D.C. for a weekend of sledding, and while temperatures on Friday and Saturday stayed nice and cold, and we had some spectaular toboggan wipe-outs (which is the main point of tobogganing, as I understand it), on Sunday morning the thermometer climbed into the 40s (i.e. between 5 and 10 degrees Centigrade, for you farriners). The snow turned sticky. Snowballs flew back and forth like carrier pigeons with one basic but never monotonous message.
By the time we got to the top of the field it was time for some sunbathing, and that’s when Seung’s interest in snowball-making turned from skirmishing to art, as seen in the film.
I wanted to see if I could make a video shorter than a minute and a half, primarily because my most common reaction to other amateur videos is that they aren’t edited well enough. I’m sure there are still lots of things I could improve, though. I don’t particularly like the sound of my own voice, and in general the video doesn’t come close to conforming to the idea I had in advance. There are a lot of avant-gardey things I simply don’t know how to do, and probably can’t do until I get better video editing software (on order). But it’s a start.
Incidentally, I also have a photo of Seung up on the photo blog — a badly underexposed, low-resolution snapshot taken with the camcorder that I altered almost beyond recognition in the digital darkroom for a portrait of an altered state which is not, I assure you, an accurate representation of our condition at the time.
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, where I'm doing a reading on April 10.
Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop" Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems Spoil, an online collection of my older poems
"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
Smorgasblog
Mark Doty
And then, when they were done, I turned my head and saw, on a video screen, my own heart. It was golden, and pulsing, and resembled a cross between a Georgia O'Keefe flower and a jellyfish.
----
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.
----
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