Luisa Igloria on her daily writing practice

Now it’s the turn of Via Negativa’s other regular contributor to hold forth at Marly Youmans’ blog as part of the ongoing House of Words series there. Fortunately, she’s not quite as prolix as I was! Luisa talks about how she got started using entries from The Morning Porch as writing prompts, and gives three examples of how particular entries sparked the poems they did.

For instance, Dave’s TMP observation on January 28 was “The silence of falling snow. When my furnace kicks on, the three deer digging under the wild apple tree startle and run down the slope.” When I read that, the first sentence, “The silence of falling snow” coupled with the image of “the wild apple tree” had a certain beautiful gravity that felt– and sounded– almost biblical. The wild apple tree and the three deer digging also made me think immediately of medieval tapestries, rich with illustrations of plants and animals. From there it was a short leap to recalling stories in bestiaries like the Physiologus. […]

I find Luisa’s fealty to craft and the creative venture endlessly inspiring. Go read.

Festival of the Trees returns to Via Negativa on July 1

The world’s longest-running — and probably only — blog carnival devoted to all things arboreal, the Festival of the Trees, turns five next month. Its very first edition appeared on July 1, 2006 right here at Via Negativa, so it seemed fitting to bring it back for edition #61. The theme is open, but I’m especially interested in new discoveries about trees and forests, either of a scientific or personal nature.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a blog carnival, think of it as a homeless links blog which crashes on a different blog-couch every month. Or as my FOTT co-conspirator Jade Blackwater puts it (see What’s a Blog Carnival?):

A blog carnival is a recurring, theme-driven publication which congregates content from many sources in one place online.

A single issue of a blog carnival reads just like a great big blog post filled with links to many other blog posts (or photo galleries, or videos, etc.) that talk about the same subject.

The purpose of a blog carnival is to engage with the world wide community to celebrate subjects of common interest (in our case, trees and forests).

So contributors post material on their own blogs or websites and send the links to the host of the upcoming edition. For FOTT #61, email your article permalinks to me: bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com, and be sure to put “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line so I’ll know it’s not spam. The deadline is June 30.

We have much more information about the Festival at our coordinating site, but I think the easiest way to grasp the concept is to browse some of the past editions, started with the most recent edition at Rubies in Crystal. This was Brenda Clews’ first time hosting, and she did something very ambitious: ask participants “to record an engagement with a tree or trees, preferably in video, but any form. To talk to the trees and bring back what transpired.” The response was impressive, and included 12 videos. (Note that video embedding is really just a fancy form of linking, and is therefore encouraged in blog carnivals.) Check it out.

I didn’t get around to making a video in time for Brenda’s edition, I’m sorry to say, but I was so impressed by a poem she reprinted from Dick Jones’ blog, I decided to ask Dick if I could make a video for it. He not only agreed, but recorded a reading for me to incorporate. I’ll be sharing this on Moving Poems next week, but here it is for those who can’t wait. (Note that HD is off by default; click on “HD” in the lower right corner if your internet speed supports it.) To read the text of the poem, refer to Brenda’s post.


Watch at Vimeo.

House of Wordiness: my nearly endless interview at the Palace

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

Incognito

London blogger meetup

Sometimes for various reasons the best photo may be the one that conveys the least information. I believe this is the only digital artifact from a May 12 get-together of six bloggers at a London pub which can be shared without upsetting any of the parties involved. Continue reading “Incognito”

In lieu of a postcard

One of the great advantages of meeting bloggers on one’s travels is that one can be lazy and simply link to their accounts of one’s meetings. I had a lovely time with Fiona Robyn and Kaspalita, and Fiona has written up everything, including the Clive Hicks-Jenkins exhibition and the exceptional hospitality of Anne and Basil Wolf, on her Writing Our Way Home blog. Callum James, one of the other poets at the Friday night reading, blogged it (as previously noted) at Front Free Endpaper, and Andrea Selch has a picture of us all, together with a news post, at the Carolina Wren Press site. Then in Birmingham I enjoyed a couple hours of conversation with the novelist, philosopher and Renaissance man Will Buckingham — see “Talking About Zhuangzi in Birmingham.”

I wish I could share some of the photos I’ve been taking, but since I don’t own a laptop and am dependent on the kindness of my hosts for internet connectivity, I’m afraid that won’t be happening until after my return to Pennsylvania.

WordPress and my grandfather’s tool shop

It occurs to me that I like to tinker with WordPress installations in the very same way that my late grandfather used to putter around in his shop. He and Grandma spent the summers here when I was a kid, living in the same small tenant house I currently occupy. One of the first things he did when they moved their stuff up here from their old place in Pennington, New Jersey, was to establish a typically male domain, complete with workbench, cabinets and lots of tools, up in the non-chicken-coop portion of the old shed. Grandma was a quiet soul who liked to read and do crossword puzzles; it’s not like she drove him out of the house. He just loved to tinker. I don’t remember him being especially good at anything except wiring — he was a retired electrical engineer — but that didn’t stop him from acquiring tools and attempting to fix things.

My dad, too, had a work shop of sorts; his was in the basement. But it shared space with the laundry area, the freezer, and the canning shelves and jelly cabinet, which were all part of Mom’s domain, so Dad wasn’t a typical guy in this respect. Also, I don’t think his heart was ever fully in it. Unlike his father, I don’t think he actively looked for excuses to putter around on the workbench. He and I take more after his mother, I think, and would just as soon read most of the time. Since his retirement from the Penn State library, he’s become a full-time scholar, and turned his bedroom into a study for his research and web work on peaceful societies. Mom’s own study is just down the hall.

Unlike me, though, Dad is content to use the same design and tools for his website as when he started out seven years ago. The two news articles that he posts to his site each week are thoroughly researched and exhaustively edited. I’m not sure that would be the case if he spent as much time tinkering with his site as I do with my various blogs. Sure, there are a lot of nifty navigation and site-promotion tools he’d be able to take advantage of if he were on WordPress or some other CMS, but the site still gets a ton of traffic, almost never goes down, and is unlikely to be targeted by malicious or commercial hackers that way WordPress installations are.

A self-hosted WordPress site, by contrast, practically demands tinkering. Yes, it’s easy to install and the user interface is very intuitive, but with the constant threat of new hacks and the updates required to keep ahead, you can’t just ignore the inner workings of a site and assume that things will be fine. I found this out the hard way during my first year with the platform, which was back when all updating had to be done by FTP or the like. I didn’t have the cPanel option because I was on my cousin’s server at the time, and I made the mistake of relying upon him to keep the site running, neither of us understanding what exactly was required. Fortunately, Via Negativa was hit not by the malicious kind of hacker but the kind who wants to hide ads on your site where only logged-out visitors will see them. Such hackers have a vested interest in seeing that the site continues to perform as expected. And getting rid of them gave me a crash course in the inner workings of the software, which was bolstered a year later when I decided to move the site to a regular shared web host, and had to figure out how to move a database and such. By that point I was eagerly installing plugins willy-nilly and re-jiggering the layout every chance I could get.

So gradually I got more and more comfortable with the platform, without necessarily becoming very good at it. It’s in that respect that I think I most resemble Grandpa, and probably many other hobbyists and gear-heads. I like knowing what I can do, and acquiring the tools to do it, and I have full confidence in my ability to do the equivalent of dropping a new transmission into any of my sites if so required — but let’s hope that confidence is never put to the test.

This fragment of memoir is actually an abandoned introduction to “Five Years of WordPress: a love note,” q.v.

Link roundup: Things I give a flying f*ck about

A few links I’ve shared on Facebook over the past three weeks. With all the poetry reading I did last month, I didn’t have much time for anything else.

Truthout: “Why the United States is Destroying its Educational System”
Chris Hedges, depressingly on-target as usual.

The Atlantic: “Stephen King on the Creative Process, the State of Fiction, and More”
Stephen King has some nice things to say about poets. (But preferring Judas Priest to Black Sabbath? No accounting for taste!)

Harriet: “Death of a Kingmaker: A Critical Evaluation of Silliman’s Blog”
How being a powerful blogger can interfere with writing. I found Silliman very cordial the couple times I communicated with him, a genuine guy with some strong opinions and an equally strong streak of generosity. I wasn’t a regular reader, though.

Poetry Daily: “Casino” by Osip Mandelstam — a new version by Christian Wiman
Probably the single best poem I read all April.

Glenn Greenwald @Salon: “Lessons from Manning’s transfer out of Quantico”

This episode should be a potent antidote to defeatism, as it provides a template for how issues that would be otherwise ignored can be amplified by independent voices creatively using the democratizing and organizing power of the Internet, and meaningful activism achieved.


Not just a gag gift, but a very simple concrete or visual poem. I’m trying to think how I can integrate one into a panel discussion at next year’s AWP.

Off to the United Kingdom

I’ll be away from May 1 to May 16, but don’t worry: new content will continue to appear at Via Negativa! Though I won’t be updating The Morning Porch from the road, Luisa, loath to give up her daily poem habit, will be delving into the Morning Porch archives for poetry prompts and posting the results here (with links to the original posts). I’ve also prepared a few things to auto-post while I’m gone, including a podcast interview with William Trowbridge and some new poems, so stay tuned for that. Continue reading “Off to the United Kingdom”

Woodrat Podcast 36: Diane Lockward

Diane Lockward

For the first of our Poetry Month conversations, Kristin Berkey-Abbott and I talked by phone with Diane Lockward, whose most recent book of poems, Temptation by Water, we had both recently read (or re-read, in Kristin’s case). For links to all three of Diane’s books, see her website. She blogs about poetry at Blogalicious.

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