March 2011 – Page 4 – Via Negativa

March 16, 2011November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Spindle

This entry is part 93 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

Today a poet read these words transcribed
from a different language: “Mi destino intermitente”
—and a door opened into a garden where the weather
was overcast and damp, but things were growing:
for instance, new leaves of lamb’s-ears looking delicately
furred, alive, alert. We passed through and touched
the dark veins of flowers pulsing on the vine, caught
our spindle-shaped reflections— fusiforme—
in puddles of water. Sometimes the world bends to
your position. The wasp returns to its nest and
finds it in tatters. Sometimes it is enough to live
in the complicated arc between losing and finding,
enough to gather what sweetness remains.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 16 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

March 15, 2011September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

How to Know the Wildflowers: Preface

This entry is part 1 of 29 in the series Wildflower Poems

It started with a brief, almost cryptic email from naturalist and photographer Jennifer Schlick on January 3rd, with the subject heading “New Year Dreaming”:

So what if Dave wrote poems for these and then Deb made the whole thing into a handmade book?

I clicked on the link and found myself looking at macro photos of 16 native spring wildflowers, almost all of them old friends. Count me in, I said. I’m always looking for good poetry prompts to feed the blog, and these photos were stunners. Somewhere along the line, Jennifer filled in another vital piece of information: that her work was to be featured in a gallery show in Jamestown, New York in May, with frames handmade by a local woodworker. This was a dream whose real-world foundation was already half-laid.

But who wouldn’t jump at the chance to dream of wildflowers in the middle of a long winter? The resulting series, now 24 28 in length with the addition of some photos from Jennifer’s files, includes some of the strongest work I’ve written, which I think speaks to the power of her images. I know from my own dabbling with cameras that photographing woodland wildflowers at all can be a challenge; doing it in such a way as to avoid the easy and the obvious, and draw our attention to the true strangeness of nature, is a feat. These photos compelled me take another look at what had previously been mere fixtures in the landscape, albeit well-loved ones, and to start seeing them as complete beings.

This of course led to research in books and online. For some flowers, it’s the folklore that fascinates, while others’ unique habits or appearances call out for poetic treatment. In my mother’s large library of nature books, I found two old volumes with the same title: How to Know the Wildflowers. Unfortunately, neither book taught what the title promised — since when does mere identification constitute knowledge? But I liked the suggestion that one must learn a method of inquiry specific to flowers. Jennifer herself once wrote:

I can lose hours making my images; an entire day can disappear when I’m in the field shooting. Another day — gone in processing the pictures.

The results surprise me. Where do these images come from? And what do they want me to know?

Unanswerable questions, really, though it’s the job of poetry to try anyway. It would be hard to find a richer subject. Flowering plants are key to most terrestrial ecological communities, and flowers are potent symbols in nearly every human culture. There are more than 300,000 species of flowering plants on earth. Though we speak dismissively of “flowery speech,” as if flowers were mere ornaments, the fact is that without them, we would starve.

The basic fact of flowers’ existence — that they are sex organs — wasn’t understood until the 17th century, and the exact mechanics of flower sex weren’t documented until the 19th century, so for most of human history, poets, along with everyone else, had basically no idea how to know the wildflowers. But now we owe it to ourselves to learn all we can of these most sophisticated and essential of our fellow citizens. Pablo Neruda, an accomplished naturalist, has wowed millions of readers with his line: “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” To know flowers in any real sense is to understand something of our place in the cosmos.

Note: If you are a publisher and would be interested in bringing this series out in full color, let us know. We’re planning to do something through Lulu, but will entertain other offers.

March 15, 2011November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

After

This entry is part 91 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

Evening of the first day, the man who owned a truck yard
next door laid out plywood sheets on hard ground and said

Come— And all the neighbors came, bringing blankets,
sheets, canvas tarp, burlap— The very young and the trembling

old slept in vehicles, windows cracked open for air—
And the night air was notched with metallic smells but also

something almost sweet, like flowers— I did not want
to think what kind– And the following day it rained,

and then again the next, so between aftershocks we collected
water in pails and tin drums— Someone had a kerosene stove

and lit it in the shadow of the broken shed where the honeysuckle
vines were a vivid green interspersed with orange— And still

we refused to go indoors, though gradually we crept
back to those parts of our homes still standing— Porches

were good for sleeping— When the sun glimmered
through thin clouds we heard news of a few places

where we could walk to line up for bread, rice,
canned goods— And someone had busted a water pipe

near the park (just a little they said) and people went
with cans and plastic tubs for water— And the men

came back weeping, having dug out bodies from collapsed
buildings, from vehicles overtaken by landslides

on the mountain road— And strangers offered
rides, and helicopters hovered in the sky— And we heard

lamentations and questions on the lips of everyone— Faces
streaked often and easily, eyes filling with tears and blinking

not from the sunlight but from what they could barely endure—

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 15 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

March 14, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Dwarf Ginseng

This entry is part 24 of 29 in the series Wildflower Poems

Panax trifolius

Because the root is round
& no bigger than a nut
it is not worth its weight in gold,
though still prized as medicine.
Had it limbs like a man
we might sing out its name—
little brother ‘sang! Instead,
we step over its perfect clouds,
oblivious to the mystery
of its androdioeciousness,
why some umbels should be all male
& others hermaphroditic,
how that little knot of a root
unties itself from year to year:
the flower fading to pink
shrinks & shrivels with the rest
of the above-ground parts, & when
it re-sprouts the following spring,
it’s no longer the same sex—
how it got that way
& why it persists, dwarf,
mountain-dweller,
unmaker of aches.

March 14, 2011November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Landscape with Red Boots and Branch of Dead Cherry

This entry is part 90 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

In a photograph, a woman sits on her haunches
amid a sea of debris. Her feet are bare. A pair of red
rain boots caked with mud perches neatly at her side,
the way they might rest in a parlor. The sky is the color
of rain, the color of heaving things: water a wall
surging over highways, toppling cars and beams
and lorries. The past tense is already active here—
fields have lost their stenciled borders; there’s little left
to read in maps. Above the burning cities, snowflakes
scatter, wandering back and forth like spirits. I watch
one explode against the branch of a dead cherry.
Croak of a raven making the shape of a thousand names.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 14 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

March 13, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Link roundup: Reenacting apocalypse, answering Neruda, and listening to tinamous

NYTimes.com: “Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami”
It’s hard to imagine a better way to convey the devastation and horror of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami than this interactive feature. With a sweep of the cursor, we can reenact apocalyse.

Wikipedia: Sendai
I was moved to learn that Sendai is nicknamed City of the Trees, and has a couple annual festivals that highlight its magnificent zelkova trees.

t r u t h o u t : “Assault on Collective Bargaining Illegal, Says International Labor Rights Group”
I have a theory that the Wisconsin governor is actually a stealth socialist, doing everything he can to revive the union movement in America.

Poetry Daily: Three poems by Laura Kasischke

The day
en route to darkness. The guillotine
on the way to the neck. The train
to nudity. The bus
to being alone. The main-and-mast,
and the thousand oars, the
thousand hands.

New Internationalist: “Daring to Care: Notes on the Egyptian Revolution”
By Egyptian expat poet (and Facebook friend) Yahia Lababidi.

As they recited poetry, people were admirably organized and generally festive — singing, dancing and staging improv-theatre — showing us all that a revolution could be a work of art, and a way of life, even.

The Task at Hand: “Porch Poetry”

While The Morning Porch is Dave’s, there are plenty of porches — or at least perches — in every neighborhood. With that in mind, I’m calling my little collection A View From Another Porch. While I’ll certainly be adding new posts on other subjects throughout the season of Lent, each day an additional observation will be tucked in here. After not quite a week of looking around, I’m enjoying the discipline far more than I expected to, and I’m looking forward to continuing the heart and eye-opening exercise until Easter.

Shearsman ebooks: Talking to Neruda’s Questions by M T C Cronin [PDF]
Anyone who’s read Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions should appreciate this. Cronin attempts to answer each of Neruda’s questions in the same spirit. Delightful.

Spring Beauty and the bees: Volunteer pollinator monitoring
Awesome pun, great-sounding citizen science project.

Drawing the Motmot: “Tropical Rainforest Sounds”
Some field recordings by artist-blogger Debby Kaspari. Biological diversity translates directly to sonic diversity, I imagine. Hands down the most interesting music I’ve heard all week.

Revamping Via Negativa’s About page this week, I came up with my best thumbnail description to date: “Via Negativa is a personal web log with delusions of grandeur.” I also included a new take on my old “Words on the Street” cartoon by Siona (the blogger, not the inchworm genus). Check it out.

March 13, 2011November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Lint

This entry is part 89 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

What would you give up or do for others
this season of sacrifice, penance, and fasting?
asks the Catechism teacher of the fourth
and fifth graders. A boy in the classroom
writes, his struggles with spelling equal to
those with theology and science: “Lint
is an elemental metal that is light and
durible.” Oh merry mixed-up strand
in the middle of all this gravitas, yarn
twisted in domestic hue— Lint, he said:
lint from the undersides of sleeves; pillings
gathered in the pockets of our coats, fur
left behind by the feral cat pressing
its belly to the grass— all the little
parts that come off, that we shed as we
scrape through the surfaces of days.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 13 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

March 12, 2011 by Dave Bonta

On Beyond Zebra: discovering @font-face

This entry is part 13 of 20 in the series Poetics and technology

On Beyond Zebra cover On 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.

March 12, 2011November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Look

This entry is part 88 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

“Mira: you will never see faces like this again” —C.D. Wright
And so therefore yes, every [expletive] poem is a love poem.

Sunrise: from a thousand feet up, the cry of a lost shorebird, circling the long brown waves of hills. Picturesque, no? Almost like a Breugel. Do not ask what it is grieving for, but why. And Obi-wan Kenobi sensed the destruction of Alderaan: “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.” See if in another part of the frame there is a figure falling, fallen, drowning, drowned; if just beyond those hills, that smudge is the smoke of cities burning even as they churn into open water, the land a cracked template that will no longer hold. What are those bodies doing on the rooftops of buildings? For whom do they open their mouths and cry? Prayers and lamentations, oaths, pleading. Who has not lost anything? I would be the dog that wants to embrace its doggy life, would want to suck on the gristle right down to the bone; I don’t know about you, but that’s what I know of immanence. I would be the horse that wants to scratch its behind on the tree as long as it still could. The children want to skate in a pond at the edge of the wood because there, the trees light up like fire; and the cold that stings their faces and the thin patches of ice make the blood beat hard in their chests. What do you love? What do you love? Everything that can be given, everything that can be taken away.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 12 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

March 11, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Starflower

This entry is part 23 of 29 in the series Wildflower Poems

Trientalis borealis

Seven stamens twist
like one-legged strangers
at a station, anxious to avoid
each other’s gaze.

The train hasn’t come,
might never come.
The snow gives off a radiance
like a face at the bottom of a well.

The platform shakes
on its slender stalk. We are
in this together, & the stars
are closer than we think.