Where I’ve been

If you’ve been wondering about my relative absence the past few days, I’ve working on a longish article on blog design for my new monthly column “O Tech!” at Read Write Poem: How to Reach the Masses. It’s geared toward poetry bloggers, but should contain some useful tips for anyone with a blog or website. As I say at the end of the piece, I’m still very much a learner when it comes to the web. But I do enjoy it, and I like sharing what little knowledge I’ve acquired over the years.

I’ve also been a little preoccupied with Via Negativa’s little-sister blog The Morning Porch, which I’ve moved off Tumblr and onto a WordPress installation with the aid of a handy export tool I found online. I may or may not stick with the current design; most of my attention so far has been on getting a couple of plugins to work with untitled posts. Fun!

“Twitter for poets”: poetry and conversation in Identica

Identica LogoOver at Identica — the open-source, feature-rich microblogging service which I greatly prefer to the faddish Twitter — I’m collaborating on a chain poem with librarian-blogger Patricia Anderson. It’s probably still quite a few days from completion, but those with an interest in the creative process and/or in social media and micromessaging technology might be interested in following the poem’s slow progress.

Twitter users will notice right away that they’re not in Kansas anymore. Up until a few weeks ago, each reply to another Identica user had a Twitter-like “in reply to” link at the bottom, and you could only follow conversations by clicking backward from one such link to another. But now, as the official description of the latest version of the underlying Laconica software puts it:

Related notices are organized into conversations, with each reply a branch in a tree. Conversations have pages and are linked to from each notice in the conversation.

In the current styling, each nested level is a slightly darker shade of gray, so that a back-and-forth between two people resembles an inverted staircase descending into darkness. A perfect medium for poetry!

Actually, I had wanted to have staggered verses, which would entail replying each time to the other person’s earliest post in the conversation, but Patricia wanted to let the conversation proceed naturally and keep nesting deeper with each reply instead. The poem can end, she suggested, at the point where replies no longer nest. We’re not sure exactly when that will be, but we should have at least another week at our current rate of one or two posts per day. I proposed the topic: “in the news,” with regular images drawn from current, international news stories. You can see our conversation about the poetic conversation — the meta-poem — here.

This is, as far as I know, the first collaborative poem in Identica written to take advantage of the conversations feature, though earlier collaborations, such as this one between Carolee and Blythe, have been threaded retroactively. I imagine that when we’re done, we’ll repost the entire conversation at Open Micro, so I’m not too worried about keeping the thread free of non-poetry replies. In fact, I thought it was pretty cool when an Identica user from Ukraine — Kobzahrai, whom I got to know initially as a fellow member of the blues group — responded appreciatively to my opening sally about the strange mayor of Kiev.

Identica has a small but active poetry community, lured there by such features as groups and favorite notices. Belonging to groups such as poetry, writers, haiku, or lyrics can greatly help reduce the noise-to-signal ratio in your feed, because you don’t need to subscribe to someone who writes 90 percent of the time about Ubuntu, for example, just to see their occasional haiku. And while Twitter also allows you to save favorite posts by other users, only Identica notifies you when someone favors one of your posts. The six most popular posts of the day appear at the top of the sidebar on the front page of Identica, and a longer compendium of currently popular posts is one click away. And perhaps because we poetry fans are inveterate word-hoarders, we probably “favorite” things more often than other users, giving an impression to casual visitors that Identica is — as someone once told Evan Prodromou, the lead developer — “Twitter for poets.”

Incidentally, if you follow me on Twitter and are wondering why you’re not seeing my half of our collaborative poem there, too, that’s because I’ve elected not to send my “@” replies across the automatic bridge that Identica provides.* Most Twitter folks already struggle to make sense of a morass of atomized messages, and I don’t see any point in subjecting them to additional fragments. Twitter is increasingly about broadcasting anyway; “power users” compete to see who can acquire the most followers, with whom conversations will generally be limited to one-way exercises in “crowd sourcing.” If you want true conversation, group-enabled camaraderie, or poems longer than 140 characters (multi-authored renga? Ballads? Epics?) Identica is the place to be.
__________

*The lead developers of Identica are committed to an open microblogging protocol, which if ever fully adopted would mean that users of competing micromessaging services would be able to subscribe and reply to each other without leaving their own service, just as we now do with competing email services. The people who run Twitter, like AOL and Comcast in days of yore, don’t seem to see the need to give their users that freedom, so Twitter is still essentially a silo.

Agony blogs

Everyman

Here begynneth a treatyse how þe hye Fader of Heven sendeth dethe to somon every creature to come and gyve acounte of theyr lyves in this worlde, and is in maner of an amorall blogge. So might the 15th-century classic Everyman begin, were it rewritten for the 21st-century internet. And why not? This is the age of the anonymous Every(wo)man: the troll, the hacker, the file sharer, the Wikipedia editor, the YouTuber. It makes sense that a culture obsessed with celebrities would find an anti-hero in Every(wo)man, whose touching or deplorable exploits are celebrated in dozens if not hundreds of highly popular blogs and websites. Consider:

  • FMyLife
    The ultimate agony column, minus the helpful advice part: anonymous readers submit brief vignettes illustrating their personal misery, and other anonymous readers get to vote either “i agree, your life is f****ed” or “you deserved that one.” Such interactivity, whether through voting or commenting, is of course a key contributor to the popularity of Every(wo)man blogs.
  • Post Secret
    One of the classiest blogs in this list. Not only is the concept itself brilliant — get people to send anonymous postcards containing some secret or confession — but the culture that has grown up around the blog encourages creativity. Many of the postcards are objects of beauty, lending pathos to their often sordid contents.
  • FOUND Magazine
    Another high-quality site, which is actually just the online appendage to an old-fashioned, tree-flesh magazine, showcasing “love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles — anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life.”
  • Stall Wall Poetry
    This is a really well-done blog, with a photo and transcription of each graffito (or exchange of graffiti), the exact location (including a Google map), and a brief comment from the blogger. Very occasionally, some of the graffiti does rise to the level of poetry, but most of it seems fairly tame, perhaps because it tends to be from Canada.
  • Overheard in the Office
  • Overheard in New York
  • Overheard Everywhere
    These are sister blogs. (There’s also an “Overheard on the Beach,” but who cares about that? Actually, one Overheard blog would’ve been plenty.) Again, most content is submitted by readers, but I find it a little disappointing: if these sites are any indication, most people don’t have much of an ear for the surreal. But sometimes the merely cute almost suffices:

    Young ice cream customer: I’m going to get a large sundae.
    Competitive young ice cream customer: Oh, yeah? I once had a sundae that was so big it was…it was… (thinks about it) up to the top of Jesus!

  • Best of Craigslist
  • You Suck at Craigslist
  • Fun with Craigslist
    Ah, Craigslist — no doubt a treasure-trove for future cultural historians. It’s kind of telling that there really isn’t much difference between the first collection and the second: the worst of Craigslist is the best of Craigslist. The author of the last blog isn’t content merely to showcase found disasters, but actually elicits new trainwrecks by responding to Craigslist ads in a crank-call fashion: pro-active schadenfreude.
  • Fail Blog
    The hugely popular blog devoted to failure of all kinds. Lowbrow fun — except when it’s too painful to watch, and you start to wonder just where the humor was supposed to lie and what the hell is wrong with us that we can take such pleasure in the failures of others. There seem to be a lot of niche-specific failure blogs out there, too, such as:
  • Cake Wrecks
    “When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong.”
  • PhotoshopDisasters
  • Bad Parking

The failure blogs of most interest to me as a writer are those that focus on various kinds of found texts.

  • Passive-Aggressive Notes
    We laugh nervously. The anonymous authors of passive-agressive notes seem uncomfortably familiar.
  • Crummy Church Signs
    Decades before Twitter came along, there were church signboards with movable letters. The young and hip don’t have a monopoly on shallowness, thank Whomever. But not all the signs are crummy, either: “REMEMBER YOU ARE DUST,” says one. Hell, I remember that everytime I visit Fail Blog.
  • Vanity Plates: Creepiness in 8 Characters or Less
    What to make of someone whose licence plate reads CORPSE, or BIRTH, or simply WHY? This site is chock full of unintended writing prompts for poets and fiction writers alike.
  • texts from last night
    Text messages sent under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or sleep deprivation: a wonderful concept for a blog. Authors are identified by area code, and messages are presented out of context to increase their universal appeal, according to the About page. Samples of text-message wisdom include: “the best thing about dollar beer night is beer is only a dollar” and “i just thanked the atm machine for giving me cash.”
  • Engrish Funny
    The statement in the sidebar seems a little defensive: “Remain clam. I am a licensed Asian-American who has spend 14-years lived all over Asia. Please. Just enjoy.” Most of the bad English on the site is simply the result of poor machine translations, of course; it’s the fact that it was posted in public that makes it funny, like the sign in a Japanese supermarket that reads “Hand Shredded Ass Meat.”
  • The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
  • Apostrophe Abuse
  • Apostrophe Catastrophes
  • Literally, a Web Log
    Blogs devoted entirely to documenting a single annoying grammatical faux pas can be hit-or-miss in the humor department. Of the foregoing, only the last one really does it for me. The use of literally to mean figuratively was funny when Ambrose Bierce pilloried it a hundred years ago in Write it Right, and it’s still funny today. It’s not the mistake of a poorly educated person, as unnecessary quotation marks or a poorly placed apostrophe tends to be; it’s the mark of someone who’s full of shit and doesn’t know it. And in that category also we might also include:
  • Banned for Life
    “Tom Mangan’s collection of reviled news media cliches” (except that, as the sidebar admits, the content is in fact reader-generated). I want to like this blog, but the total lack of links to sources makes that difficult.
  • The Perplexicon
    “Intentional misspellings of brands, trademarks, and companies.” As soon as we leave Every(wo)man behind, the humor fades. For those who were expecting some sort of moral here, a la the original Everyman, I guess that’ll have to do.

Walking Forest Blues


Subscribers must click through, or visit the video page.

Transcript:
I went to the woods to live haphazardly, from hand to mouth, marching like an army on my stomach. The path travels through me like a wave, like a particle. I’ve learned nothing, & am much the better for it — the forest teaches by confounding expectations. The bright orange of an eft, like the hair of a punk rocker, says: leave me alone. The spots on a fawn are a map to a country that doesn’t want to be found. The sun doesn’t move there, trapped in a net of trees. A hen turkey clucks not to lead her chicks, who disguise themselves as stones & vanish, but to lead me, her sudden unwanted charge — to draw me away. Which might turn out to be exactly where I was going.

***

Speaking of forests, be sure to visit the June edition of the Festival of the Trees at Roundrock Journal. And for many more creepy-crawlies like the millipede in the video, check out the latest Circus of the Spineless, the blog carnival for invertebrates and the people who love them.

***

I learned something about making poetry videos today: the addition of music can mean the difference between success and failure.

*

I’m always excited to see other poet-bloggers making videos. Ren Powell recently launched a second blog to showcase her terrific poem animations, AnimaPoetics. I’m sure I’ll link to most of her videos at Moving Poems eventually, but do check out her site in the meantime. She’s posting new videos at the rate of roughly one a week.

Poetry in the Ether

When I started to write poetry as a suffocatingly earnest, paralysingly intense teenager, I scribbled down everything as it emerged into a small, blue school exercise book. Just beneath the heavily-scored-out printed title of ‘Spelling Book’, I inscribed the words ‘Poems — 1960 Until Whenever’, carefully foxed the edges of the pages, distressed the cover and thrust the slim volume just far enough into my jacket pocket for the title to be clearly visible.

Now, as a writer of poems in late middle age (60 being the new 40), I have graduated from ‘Spelling Book’ to Moleskine, but I still scribble down everything as it emerges onto its pages. If I put the two books side by side — which I just have — the only significant differences I note are that a.) whilst I read ‘Poems — 1960 Until Whenever’ with a mixture of dry-mouthed embarrassment and wry amusement, the contents of the Moleskine bring a little more satisfaction, and b.) my handwriting has got worse during the past 45 years.

All of which constitutes an unpromising start to a piece on links between writing poetry and information technology. However, cherished notebooks notwithstanding, I would claim that the latter has had a more profound influence on the former than any of the other forces that chance or design have brought to bear during the long years since ‘Poems — 1960 Until Whenever’. Here’s how.

I came to computer usage late. I maintained a lofty indifference to their rapid incursion into our lives during the ’80s, only finally deigning to tickle a keyboard when my son needed some help in typing up his degree thesis against a rapidly approaching deadline. Within 30 minutes of applying the changeover technique from typewriter percussion to keyboard caress, I was seduced. On changing schools in the early ’90s and having access to the staff computer room, I launched myself onto what, at that time, comprised the Internet.

Even in those early days there was a handful of poetry sites and one or two e-mags too. I submitted some stuff to one called So It Goes and — maybe unsurprisingly, considering the thin scattering of e-poets across the territory — got it published.

But initially there was little to promote or even sustain the interests of the online poet and for me the principal utility of the computer was as a composing and editing tool. The speed at which a poem could be formatted, amended and re-formatted was intoxicating and, after a few deranged weeks of font and layout experimentation, the flexibility and range of the medium began to have a profound influence over the structure and substance of the message.  Even in those early days of tiny monitors, keyboards like pub pianos and regular encounters with the blue screen of death, the pixel dance that had words spinning across the digital page enabled a synchronicity of content and form simply unobtainable within the humble notebook. Buying my own computer enabled me to reach beyond the limitations of Windows 95 and queues for each terminal, and being very definitely the first on my block to wire in cable broadband had me uploading and downloading at frightening speed.

As my facility both in keyboard technique and computer procedure developed, I began to transfer all my painstakingly typed manuscripts to various digital files and folders. And surfing on broadband gave me rapid access to the now burgeoning poetry sites. Here the clunky but comprehensive Electronic Poetry Center was enormously useful, providing links to the growing number of e-mags and also to the burgeoning poetry workshops. I joined two of the latter, one a multi-channelled come-one-come-all community in which effete sonnet-eers shared cyberspace with agonised goths, the other a jittery, nitpicking group of high-achieving monomaniacs seeking validation for their oeuvre.

Flitting between the two brought little creative satisfaction, but what it did provide was a degree of interaction and this was enormously exciting. Suddenly, after years of scribbling first drafts into scruffy notebooks, the final incarnations of which efforts only saw light of day when under the withering scrutiny of little mag editors, fresh work in progress was receiving the attention of my peers. Although there was a powerful sense of rivalry and general muscle flexing on the site, decent criticism was offered too and I lingered for a while and indulged the novelty of the slow motion dialogues. The process of submission of text and leisurely response was like a protracted game of chess, two players leaning over a complex board analysing the display before making a considered move.

But in the final analysis it all became a little too arid and cerebral for me. Jokes and asides were judiciously ignored in the pursuit of critical excellence and, jaded and feeling a little fraudulent in such arcane company, I dropped out one long rainy afternoon and floated off into cyberspace. I was unclear as to what it was that I hoped to find, but the potential for a much more broadly based interactivity seemed to me, in my ignorance, vast and untapped.

And so, much in the manner of the exobiologist exploring the cosmos, I guess I was looking for signs of parallel life — kindred spirits inhabiting some deep space archipelago, opening up the lines of communication and, in the best tradition of the sci-fi romance, all speaking the same language as me.

Which is how I discovered the phenomenon of the weblog. I’d heard of ‘blogs’, of course, but the notion of the online diary recording in minute quotidian detail the life and times of a Media Studies student or a post office clerk held little appeal. What I found was exhilaratingly different. By chance, my first encounter with the blog in action was via Salon, the liberal news and views clearing house, which, in 2003, still hosted a substantial blogging community. Scanning through a cross-section of the blogs on board, I marvelled at the extraordinary variety of topic and treatment and signed up.

Had I had the ghost of an idea of the struggles ahead in trying to master the diabolical complexities of the Radio Userland software, I might never have set down the foundations of the Patteran Pages. But with lunatic persistence I persevered and so began the steep uphill ascent that — in between major Sisyphian descents — comprised the final rite of passage in my IT education.  For three years the Patteran Pages operated from the security of the Salon Blogs community. A blog platforming homebrew poetry alongside bits of splenetic political commentary and items showcasing the juvenile humour of its proprietor found plenty of elbow space amongst the Salon misfits. Firm friendships were forged and a powerful sense of mutual endeavour prevailed.

But eventually the gasket blew in my RU engine room and when Lawrence, the overworked and under-appreciated Salon Blogs techie, finally nursed it back into life, I still couldn’t upload pictures.  So I ventured forth into the wide-open spaces outside the Salon stockade, choosing Typepad as my new host. Which is where I have been more or less comfortably ever since. Within a few months of my departure from the Salon blog community, Salon announced that they were discontinuing blog hosting and a diaspora followed. I have retained contact with a handful of my erstwhile comrades, but links to the majority of blogs on my sidebar have been made since the move.

I’m now in my sixth year of blogging. I can work within the flexible and largely user-friendly procedures of the Typepad format with confidence, but in some ways I regret the rapid advance of template technology. Having begun to master HTML in order to deal with the eccentricities of Radio Userland, the off-the-shelf technology of Typepad has made me lazy. Where I might have further advanced my IT skills by exploring design possibilities, my concentration is now entirely on content with the emphasis being on the presentation of my own poetry.

Lately it occurs to me: What a long, strange trip it’s been. Long and strange indeed, but exciting, enriching and fruitful too. At a time of life when many are contemplating not a lot more than consolidating what they’ve already got, I find the daily adventure of blogging — the devising, the sharing, the research, the reading, the interacting — revitalising and energising. Most of all, it has provided, and continues to provide, a powerful stimulus to my writing. Everything I write goes into the notebook first; I never compose straight onto screen. But there exists a continuum of creativity now whereby from the privacy and seclusion of the first scribbled elements of a poem, a route is followed through the portals of the keyboard, the computer and the router into the wider world. Way outside the scope of my wildest sci-fi dreams back in the far-off days of ‘Poems — 1960 Until Whenever’, but cherished beyond measure now.

—Dick Jones

Nature in 140 characters: microblogging from the front porch

view of my front porch in mid-May

For years, I’ve greeted the day by sitting out on the front porch of my 150-year-old cottage in a mostly wooded hollow in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. It’s a habit I began back when I was a smoker, I guess. Fresh from a hot shower, I find if I bundle up enough and cradle a thermos mug of coffee in my hands, I can sit outside even in the middle of January, though I might not last for more than 15 or 20 minutes on the coldest days. The porch sits high above a small, overgrown yard, which is adjacent to the woods’ edge, the headwaters of Plummer’s Hollow Run, and a small cattail marsh next to the old springhouse. Due to this strategic location, it’s probably one of the best spots for watching wildlife on the mountain. If I sit still enough, the animals quickly forget I’m there.

This daily habit of quiet observation is very important to me. Even if the rest of my day is taken up with busyness and distractions, at least I’ll have had a short period of attentiveness to the natural world to keep me grounded and keep my writing from straying too far into the ether. When I began blogging in December 2003, I had some idea that I would focus on religious agnosticism — whence “Via Negativa” — but within a very short time, morning porch observations began to creep in, and pretty soon I dropped all pretence of a focus in favor of writing about whatever popped into my head first thing in the morning.

In November of 2007, I started a new online experiment: using Twitter to record daily observations from the front porch. I unexpectedly found the 140-character limit a goad to lyricism. Like the French writers in the Oulipo movement, I’ve always been interested in “seeking new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy,” especially those involving artificial constraints. I hadn’t meant to write poetry, but readers on Twitter began to assure me that’s what I was doing, and who am I to argue?

I soon began backing up these posts to a blog — The Morning Porch — and in July of 2008, switched from Twitter to the much more reliable and feature-rich, open-source alternative Identi.ca as my primary microblogging platform, though I continue to forward my updates to Twitter via an automatic bridge.

My main goal with this project, I suppose, is to excite curiosity about and appreciation for the natural world among other users of Twitter and Identi.ca (and to some extent, my contacts on Facebook, where my Morning Porch posts also appear via an application for Friendfeed, another micromessaging service which I use mainly for lifestreaming purposes). Both as a poet and as a nature-lover, I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to reach beyond traditional audiences, and not just preach to the choir. A loose-knit community of poets, geeks, and other assorted misfits has sprung up on Identi.ca, which is to Twitter roughly as a very cool party is to Times Square on New Year’s Eve. There are many more birders recording their observations on Twitter, perhaps influenced by that service’s songbird iconography, but I don’t consider myself a birder — I’m not particularly interested in keeping lists or identifying rare nonresident species — so I haven’t made an active effort to connect with them, beyond following those whose blogs I already read. There are also active groups of poets, gardeners, eco-freaks, and other compatible folks on Twitter, though they’re slow in discovering each other due to the lack of effective, platform-internal semantic tagging and group tagging — features I’ve grown used to on Identi.ca.

Oddly, perhaps, given its origin on social networking services, I haven’t installed a comments system on the Morning Porch blog. The posts themselves are so short, I guess I’m resistent to the idea of burdening them with commentary; if folks want to comment, they can simply join Identi.ca and respond there. Also, the platform I’m using, Tumblr, doesn’t have native comments, and I’m reluctant to commit to an external commenting system because there’s a good chance I’ll move the blog to a self-hosted WordPress installation at some point. (Tumblr has promised to introduce an export tool.) (UPDATE: The blog has now been moved to a self-hosted WordPress installation with comments ennabled.)

I hope to keep the Morning Porch chronicle going for at least five years, and I envision a synoptic nature book with one page for each day of the year, five paragraphs or stanzas per page. Since I hardly ever leave home, this seems doable. But it’s also fun to go back and re-read sections of the journal in the order they were written. Looking at my posts from last May, for example, one can gain some appreciation for the two great dramas of a northern Appalachian spring: the return of neotropical migrant birds and the leafing out of the forest canopy. In May, more than any other time of the year, the forest is a-twitter.

***

May 1, 2008
Roar of the quarry in my left ear, burble of a wren in my right, and in the front yard a catbird sits in the lilac, silent, head swiveling.

May 2
Two Jurassic-like things, both of them “great”: the call of a great-crested flycatcher, and seconds later, a great blue heron in flight.

May 3
The air smells of rain. A large robber fly buzzes into my weed garden and lands on the underside of a dame’s-rocket leaf.

May 4
The bleeding-heart I bought yesterday, still in its pot, pulls in the first hummingbird of the year: shimmery red gorget, grotesque blooms.

May 5
Bright sunny morning. A hooded warbler bursts from the white lilac; for a moment I think it’s a yellowthroat with his mask on wrong.

May 6
Full leaf-out is still a week or two off. In the green wall of woods across from my porch, the dawn sky leaks through a hundred holes.

May 7
Behind the lilac, the sounds of a fierce wood thrush altercation. A third thrush lands close by and swipes its bill against the branch.

May 8
Rain at dawn. In the half-light, the green is intense. Add the bell-like tones of wood thrushes, and the effect is other-worldly.

May 9
Rain. Have robins always had white spots on the ends of their tails? Yesterday afternoon, four eastern kingbirds in the field—unmistakeable.*

May 10
Two myrtle colonies are closing in on what’s left of my lawn. In the grass, the green fists of bracken open complex fingers to the rain.

May 11
Sunday, and one can hear between bursts of oriole song the creaking of wings, the drone of a bumblebee, a deer snorting a quarter-mile off.

May 12
Black-throated green: the warbler lisping at the woods’ edge, but also the woods itself, green-feathered, trunks running dark with rain.

May 13
Cold and clearing. The black cat pads up the driveway, coyote bait still in her belly** and the usual hungry, hateful look in her yellow eyes.

May 14
At first light, the silhouette of a hawk in a dead tree above the corner of the field. A small rabbit grazes in the yard, ears twitching.

May 15
Cloudy and cool. A tanager’s plucked string; no glimpse of scarlet. Where are they off to, the hummingbirds that keep zooming past my porch?

May 16
At 6:00, the sky grows dark again as a storm approaches. Wood thrushes start back up. The lilac’s white torches all point at the ground.

May 17
The same woodpeckers and nuthatches that we heard all winter, but with flickering leaves. The same wind as yesterday, but with golden light.

May 18
A black-and-white warbler’s two-syllable whisper; drumroll from a Good God bird. The clock is blinking—what time IS it? The patter of rain.

May 19
Birdcall like the chant of some demented sports fan: the yellow-billed cuckoo is back! The forest canopy must be full enough to skulk in.

May 20
A gray squirrel seems to be in heat: as in January, the slow-motion chases, the soft scold-calls, but now mostly hidden by the leaves.

May 21
Sun! I hear the crow that thinks it’s a duck, a catbird’s simultaneous translation of a wood thrush song. Last night, I dreamed of bluejays.

May 22
A male robin scours the forest floor for twigs; the female combs the lawn for dead grass. The small thorn bush shakes when they both fly in.

May 23
The gibbous moon no sooner clears the trees than the sun comes up. First crystal-clear morning in weeks, and I’m off to New Jersey.

May 26
Robins mating on a branch: one-second contacts spaced half a minute apart. Each time the male flies off and the female ruffles her feathers.

May 27
Warm, humid, and overcast. In the side garden, the first twelve yellow irises opened in the night. Small flies walk all over my legs.

May 28
The flower heads on the white lilac are half-brown now. Two phoebes take turns flying into the bush, momentarily quelling insistent peeps.

May 29
Clouds like scales on the belly of a blue fish. In the garden, ants immobilized by the cold cling to the sweet pink seams of peony buds.

May 30
In one direction, a singing wood thrush; in the other, a red-eyed vireo. Evocative refrain or dull repetition? It’s all in the delivery.

May 31
In the light rain, a squirrel feasts on red maple keys. Reduced to pieces, the blades flutter straight down, robbed of all ability to spin.
_____

*A white tip on the tail is a diagnostic feature of the eastern kingbird.

**In other words, she was still pregnant.

In lieu of new content

One great thing about blogging is that whenever writer’s block strikes — or even writer’s ennui, which is all I think I’m afflicted with at the moment — I can always tinker around under the hood. And since I have more than one blog, that makes for a lot of tinkering! Here’s some of what I’ve been up to lately.

Shadow Cabinet move and redesign

Shadow Cabinet has now followed Spoil off of WordPress.com and onto vianegativa.us. The new address is shadowcabinet.vianegativa.us. I know a few of you link to the collection from your blog sidebars, for which I’m grateful, but please do change the links when you get a chance. For now, I’ve left a page up at the old domain directing people to the new one. Obviously, any links to specific poems, from old blog posts or elsewhere, will no longer work, and I’m afraid you’ll have to visit the site to get the new links, because I’ve changed and simplified the permalink structure. In other words, you can’t just switch the domain part of the URL and expect it to work, because I’ve removed the month-and-day part.

Social media prompts

Ten days after moving onto its new host, Via Negativa continues to enjoy much faster load-times than before, and stats have improved as a result. I’m cautiously introducing a few new plugins, such as Sociable, which generates the icon-links at the foot of each post. I’m trying this instead of the more elegant-looking ShareThis icon, which I’d had before, for two reasons: the code is leaner and thus less of a drag on load-times, and I think having an unobtrusive visual prompt to share content on Twitter, Facebook, and so forth is half the point. I don’t care for clutter, so I’m keeping the list as brief as possible, excluding social bookmarking sites I don’t want traffic from (i.e. Digg) or doubt that my readers use. But if you’re fond of a social media site or bookmarking service I haven’t included, please let me know and I’ll put it in.

New commenting system

I’ve changed the template here to include the new comments functions that came with the most recent major version of WordPress (2.7): comment threading, and javascript-ennabled comment forms that update the comments thread without reloading the entire page. Comment threading, in layperson’s terms, means that you now have “reply” links below every comment in a thread. I currently have it set so comments will nest up to six deep; any more would probably look goofy given the width of the column.

I’ve also switched on avatars, to see if I can get used to having them — it’s doubtful. But if you’re wondering how you can get one to appear beside your own name, here and on other WordPress blogs, you have to register with Gravatar (stands for Globally recognized avatar) and remember to put the same email in the comment form each time.

By the way, if you, like me, are on an independently hosted WordPress installation (i.e. using WordPress.org) with a theme that hasn’t yet been updated for 2.7, I found the following tutorials invaluable:

Basically, I added the necessary line of javascript to header.php, replaced my comments.php file with the one for the default theme, then modified the sections of my stylesheet relating to the comments and comment form, borrowing both from the default theme and from Chris Harrison’s example. Of course, it helped that my theme happens to use similar CSS classes to the default theme.

Postal Poetry has turned into a static site

Submissions to Postal Poetry have really dropped off in the last couple of months, and it became obvious to Dana and me that we’d either have to become permanent cheerleaders and devote an increasing amount of time to hassling poets for submissions, or stop publishing new work and convert the site into a static gallery of poetry postcards. After much agonizing and discussion, we chose the latter course. At present we’re continuing to use the same theme with a newly widened archive page pushed to the front, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for other free or affordable WordPress themes that may work better. Permalinks to individual postcards won’t change. The present theme, designed with photobloggers in mind, is hard to beat for simplicity and usability, especially now that we’ve added category links below each postcard.

We hope the postcards on the site will continue to inspire Postal Poetry’s visitors and past contributors, and as we say on the About page, we encourage you to keep experimenting with poetry postcards, sending them to your friends, and posting them on your blogs. We’re proud of the work we’ve published there and grateful to everyone who made cards for the site, whether or not we ended up publishing them. It’s been fun.

Other news

I’m continuing to discover great new video poems, mostly on YouTube, for my Moving Poems site. I’m currently feeding it at the rate of a new post every weekday, though I expect that will slow eventually. I’m trying to avoid posting things that could be subject to take-down from YouTube for copyright infringement, because I don’t fancy having empty archives, so there are some slick documentaries that won’t make it in.

Open Micro, the group blog for micropoetry, continues to chug along with a new post or two roughly every day, and some lively discussions in the comment threads. If you haven’t jumped on the Twitter bandwagon yet, and are wondering if there’s any truth to the critiques of Twitter and similar sites as irredeemably shallow outlets for the attention-challenged, I’d encourage you to check out some of Open Micro’s contributors (linked in the foooter). Many of us see the 140-character limit of microblogging as ideal for haiku and other short poetic forms, and haiku is all about paying attention. Or as the editor of Cordite Poetry Review‘s new Haikunaut issue, Issa translator David G. Lanuoe, puts it:

Haiku is a posture, a way of seeing and being, a philosophy of life in which one dedicates one’s self to noticing, not ignoring; to being open, not closed; to discovering, not defining; to inviting meaning onto a page, never imposing it. Poets of haiku peer expectantly into the moments and moods of this universe of which we are part, ready always to be startled, to receive with open eyes the treasures and enigmas that others miss in their hell-bent rush through traffic and life.

That sounds like excellent advice for anyone afflicted with writer’s ennui, as well — blog tinkering be damned.

Spoil alert

Spoil: selected earlier poems by Dave BontaI spent entirely too much time today moving my old e-book Spoil off of WordPress.com and onto a sub-domain of this blog. The new address is spoil.vianegativa.us. I’d tell you to change your links and bookmarks, but I’m not sure anyone actually links to it.

I considered taking it down altogether, but I’m just too fond of the header image (which is by the multi-talented Lori Witzel) to let it go yet. And moving it should be good practice for moving Shadow Cabinet, whose contents I am slightly more invested in. That move will probably take even more time, because I’m not as wedded to the header image there, and therefore will be freer to play around with templates. I want to explore the available options for e-book presentation with a self-hosted WordPress installation so that we can do a good job with the electronic version of the winner of qarrtsiluni‘s first chapbook contest, which we expect to publish in November.

Why not just use Issuu, you may ask? Online flip-books are very cool looking, but I personally don’t find them as easy to read as regular webpages. More than that, though, I’m not willing to write off the visually handicapped, forgo search engine access, and deprive users of the ability to link to (and promote) specific poems. Issuu is great for print publications that just want to have something online — if you already have a nice-looking PDF, you don’t have to do anything further — but it would represent a step backward for a truly online magazine like qarrtsiluni. I also really admire good web design, and enjoy giving exposure to some of the more talented designers out there. (My new site Moving Poems represents, in part, my desire to do something with Oulipo, by Andrea Mignolo — the most attractive blend of minimalism, whitespace, and good typography in a free WordPress theme since Ulf Petterson’s Modern theme, if you ask me.)

The Conversation


Video link.

A new poem-like thing gave me an excuse to use some video I’ve been hoarding.

***

Don’t forget to bookmark or subscribe to the feed for Moving Poems, where I’m posting other people’s videoetry at the rate of five a week, skipping the weekends. I’m having a blast hunting down poetry videos on the web (95% of it on YouTube, of course), and it looks as if it’ll be many months before I run out of material. Upcoming posts include poems by Paul Celan, Nazim Hikmet, Martin Espada, and Gabriela Mistral.

By the way, if anyone has an interest in helping out, I could definitely use help in finding and translating video poems in languages other than English and Spanish (and sometimes I need help in Spanish, too, but I don’t tend to let that stop me). You would of course get full credit and link-love.

Buzz

The furnace stops and I hear the refrigerator. The refrigerator cycles off and I hear the computer. I power down the computer, turn off the lights, and now I hear nothing but the buzz in my head…

This evening’s buzz was all about the Obamas. I didn’t watch. I was busy making something new: a blogsite devoted to videoetry called Moving Poems. Nothing fancy — just a place to put my growing collection of cool poetry videos from YouTube and other video-sharing sites, with minimal commentary. The very first video I posted was a clay-on-glass animation of the Emily Dickinson poem that begins,

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –

It’s only my 43rd birthday, though. I’m not dead yet! Not as long as I still hear that buzz…