Category: Blogs and Blogging

Reviews of blogs, posts about blogging culture, tips on using WordPress — it’s all here.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

“Cocktail Dress”: anatomy of a revision

cocktail dress ad with red-tailed hawk and poem (photo by sabeth718 on Flickr)

“Cocktail Dress” started out as a simple exercise: a poetry postcard like one of these. I missed the contest deadline by a month and a half, but that’s O.K. It’d be a cool way to link to Read Write Poem, an online community and magazine I deeply believe in. I volunteered to help judge the contest, instead.

I was on the point of uploading the above image to yesterday’s post when I thought maybe I’d change the arrangement of lines, which the constraints of the image played hob with. But then of course the poem no longer fit on the photo. So I said O.K., I’ll just link to the photo at Flickr and post the poem — less confusing anyway for readers who have come to expect that any photo posted here will be one of mine.

So I had the post all ready to go again, and literally had my little arrow on the Publish button when I thought: you know, that ending is kinda lame. I’ve done more variations on that kind of ending than I can count; it feels stale to me. Bringing in the hawk like that — it’s completely unearned. What does a red-tailed hawk really have in common with a large advertisement for a dress, aside from the color red? Well, I suppose pigeons might escape the hawk by roosting on window ledges between the ad and the building, but I couldn’t think of a way to work that in without writing a completely new poem.

Draft #2 didn’t even make it to the finger-on-the-Publish-button stage:

My window is blocked by
an enormous vinyl
advertisement
for a red
cocktail dress.
When the sun strikes it
at 3:00 in the afternoon,
the room fills
with evening

& I raise the window
to listen
to its soft flapping
over the sound of traffic.
I think I almost prefer it
to my former view
of stark & naked buildings.
Our lives are better
for these artful lies:
underwire support, pumps,
cleavage in the street.
A red flag
always ennobles hunger,
turning you wild,
O wild thing.

I mean, nice try to work in a reference to the hawk, but… “wild thing”?! The only way I could’ve made that more trite would’ve been to steal the joke from that Michelob beer ad, “Preserve the wild life!” But I liked the stuff about the truth behind the lies of advertising. Why not try for once to make explicit some of the thinking behind my choice of images? Suggesting a sameness between life under capitalism and life under communism had a certain appeal, but many people’s primary association with “red flag” would be a football game. Did I want that? Shouldn’t I go back to spelling out what it was a flag for?

I kept zeroing in on the sound that enormous poster would make, which strikes me as the aesthetic pivot of the poem. I described the ad as “vinyl” without bothering to do any actual research on such ads, but let’s assume I’m right about that. (And let’s completely ignore the likelihood that the building on which the ad appears in the photo is not an apartment building. These sorts of details are covered by poetic license.) What sort of noise would it make, assuming it was very tightly stretched? I tried verb after verb. “Rustling” would suggest a connection with the sound of a dress against the skin, which would be great, but it didn’t seem an apt description of the sound as I imagined it. “Soft crepitations”? “Crackling”? “Pulsing?” It seemed to me that a light breeze would probably yield both creaking, stretching noises and a sort of soft thumping against the building. Maybe “soft pulsing” would do the trick. Still a somewhat erotic overtone there.

My window is blocked by
an enormous vinyl
advertisement
for a red
cocktail dress — a flag
for the country of hunger.
When the sun strikes it
at 3:00 in the afternoon,
the room fills
with evening

& I raise the window
to listen
to its soft pulsing
over the sound of traffic.
I think I almost prefer it
to my former view
of stark buildings
& filthy streets.
I’ve seen much too much
of that too little.

What lies beyond
the artful lie is barely
worth notice: stretch
marks, sagging breasts,
hair growing where
it shouldn’t. A future
feeding breadcrumbs
to pigeons.
But the red dress says
get ready for
a wild ride.

I decided that this draft was good enough to publish, though at the last minute I decided to change “sagging” to “pendulous” for the assonance with “stretch” and “breasts.”

But then, as is so often the case, saying the lines over and over convinced me that I couldn’t have another -ing word so close after “evening” — and there was no way in hell I’d dispense with the latter, making as it does such a crucial connection between the wrongness of the ad and the sultry evening wear it advertised (at least in the imaginary scene I was working from; I have no idea whether the dress in the photo was in fact a cocktail dress. I know almost nothing about women’s clothing).

At about the same time, I got an email from a reader questioning my use of the phrase “pendulous breasts.” “Don’t you think that phrase is a little overused to be used in a poem?” she asked. Well, I dunno — I guess so. But saying the lines over and over, I decided that the short-e assonance is actually a bit too much there, and that for aural reasons alone I should’ve stuck with “sagging.” So I made the change and republished.

But in my email response, I admitted, “I think I ruined that poem by trying to pack too many ideas into it. It started off as a simple one-stanza poem like yesterday’s…” Once I’d admitted that, there was no way I could leave it alone. It was time to go back to the first draft and see how far I could go in the direction of a complete absence of didacticism.

So the bottom two-thirds of the poem were toast. A cocktail dress achieves its effect through elegant abbreviation; shouldn’t the poem do the same? I guess I am still an old-school imagist at heart. If I ever got a tattoo of anything, it wouldn’t say Poet, it would say Show, Don’t Tell. (Maybe “show” on the back of the left hand and “don’t tell” on the back of the right, in a simple serif font…)

I’d known at some level from the beginning that “flag from the country of hunger” had to go: it just doesn’t feel fresh to me. Not only have I probably written that exact line before — that’s the way it feels — but a flag for an imaginary, allegorical country is almost a cliché in contemporary American poetry. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect from a Billy Collins or a James Tate — and good for them if they can make it new. I can’t.

Then I go back and look at the photo again. What about our perspective as outsiders trying to imagine (as I am doing) what lies behind the ad? The putative inhabitant now begins to seem as illicit as the dirty streets and sagging breasts had seemed to him or her in previous drafts. I remember an interview I heard on the radio last month with the New York Times science writer Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex, in which he waxed poetic about the human blood fluke, which has a decades-long lifespan and remains intimately connected with its partner for the whole of that long voyage through our bloodstream. No doubt blood flukes deserve a whole poem of their own, possibly an epic. (There’s also a dalliance with snails earlier in their life-cycle.) But in the meantime, let’s at least slip in a reference. Blood is red, “fluke” is a very suggestive word… it works, I think.

But back to the central question: what’s the right way to describe that sound? Do I really need to keep the traffic-noise mention in there? Surely a long-time city resident would hardly notice such a thing, not compared to the novelty of the creaking, possibly humming sign. Then I think, what about “crackle and hum”? Immediately I realize that this is a semi-plagiarism from the title of a best-selling album by U2, Rattle and Hum. I’ve never been a fan of their music, but I love the sound those two words make together. “Crackle and hum” isn’t quite as mellifluous, but it has the great advantage — for my purposes — of suggesting an old radio, especially a shortwave radio. A-ha! The poem is really about broadcasting, isn’t it?

And that’s good enough to end on, I think. The ending of a poem should always feel like a new door or window on the world has just been thrown open. My first draft tried to do that by suggesting a relationship between dress and redtail and letting the reader ponder that, but it was too pat.

My window is blocked by
an enormous vinyl
advertisement
for a red
cocktail dress.
If you’re looking up
from the street,
I am right behind
the left breast,
shameless as a blood fluke.
When the sun strikes it
at 3:00 in the afternoon,
the room fills
with evening
& I raise the window
to listen to it
crackle & hum.

Thus it was that the fourth major draft moved into the blog post and settled in after I evicted its predecessor. It seems like a responsible, dues-paying tenant, but you never know. I’ve duplicated it here in case I do end up making further adjustments.

“Cocktail Dress” is neither the best nor the worst poem I’ve ever written. There’s a grain or two of authentic insight there, I think, and the language is O.K. The main thing that’s different here is in fact the process behind it, which I have outlined in such excruciating detail partly for my own future reference.

I’ve been writing poems since the age of seven. I’m 43 now, and up until about six years ago I did write almost every poem in just this kind of laborious manner with multiple, often quite different drafts. Learning to use a word processor and slowly weaning myself off pen and paper changed things a bit, as I’ve said before, but not nearly as much as starting this blog did. In general, I think blogging has had a very beneficial effect on my writing by forcing me to write something every day — I’ve always been an exhibitionist, albeit a sometimes shy one, so blogging was a perfect fit.

But whatever happened to revision? I’ve been telling myself that I don’t do it much anymore because I don’t have to: writing in quantity for an online audience has led to a maturation of my technique. But has it really? I’ve also been known to say that the professional poets go overboard in their perfectionism, and that while we don’t have to adopt the sloppy “first draft, best draft” approach of the Beats, obsession with unobtainable perfection seems unhealthy and counterproductive. But maybe that’s just a convenient excuse to cover my natural laziness. The fact is, it’s always more exciting to generate new content than to fuss around with something I wrote last week or last year.

What scares me is that I almost published that first draft and moved on without exploring the images and ideas in any real depth. And then when I dropped the too-easy ending, I flailed about for many hours, and even posted a draft I wasn’t terribly satisfied with. Maybe it’s time I re-think the way I write poems.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Of words and birds, Tweety and otherwise

I have a real post coming, honest! But in the meantime, I have to share a couple of the web goodies I’ve come across in the last few days.

I and the Bird #133 is a treasure-trove of extended literary quotes, mostly from poems. You almost don’t have to click the links (though of course you should.) The host this time is Matthew Sarver, a fellow Western Pennsylvanian with serious naturalist chops and a gift for writing and photography. He’s still in his first year of blogging, but he seems to have taken to it like a duck to water. I and the Bird, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is a hugely successful, bi-weekly blog carnival about birds and birding — our original inspiration at the Festival of the Trees.

Matt’s one of many birdwatchers on Twitter now — the medium seems like a great fit for birders, and not just because of the avian iconography — and it was on Twitter that I caught the news about Matt’s edition of IATB as I was doing a quick check through the five accounts I maintain there. Yes, five, and I neglect than all! But I’m primarily still focused on Twitter (and Identi.ca) as a medium for micropoetry.

Back when I first started tweeting my Morning Porch entries in November 2007, one of the relatively few Twitterers then sharing haiku was @tinywords, the feed for a daily haiku site with quite a few followers. Then it fell silent in July 2008. Well, just last week I noticed a tweet from @tinywords announcing that tiny words the website was going to start back up, and I clicked through to find a brand new site. And this time, the editor has broadened the focus:

tinywords is now accepting submissions for issue #1. This issue will be edited by tinywords publisher d. f. tweney and will be published, one poem per day, starting December 1.

I’m looking for very short or micro poems of no more than 5 lines, and ideally less than 140 characters. This could include haiku, senryu, tanka, cinquains, or other forms.

Longer works (e.g. haibun) will also be considered if they include a very short poem that can be excerpted.

I’m also interested in artwork and/or poem-artwork combinations (e.g. haiga) that could fit with the theme of miniature poetry.

I’ll accept submissions for a 2-week period only, from November 10-24.

It’s great to see new venues for micropoetry popping up. Tiny words joins Fiona Robyn’s A Handful of Stones and the group blog I contribute to, Open Micro. There’s also an entirely Twitter-based microjournal called Seven By Twenty. And there are quite a few individual purveyors of micropoetry on Twitter these days.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this efflorescence of short-form verse on the web as pandering to the fractured attention spans endemic to a distraction-rich media environment. There may be some truth to that. But my idea with the Morning Porch was always to try to make people stop for a moment and go “Huh,” and to the extent that I’ve succeeded there — and led others to begin using Twitter and Identi.ca for similar purposes — I count it a success. More than that, poets have been writing various forms of micropoetry for centuries, and why? Because it turns out to be an exceptionally good way to focus the attention. What words are really necessary? What dazzling metaphor has to remain implicit if we are to capture the whole mood? I love the way my Twitter-inspired microprose-poetry discipline forces me to grapple with these questions every morning.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Undead


Direct link to video.

I got some half-decent footage of crows mobbing what turned out to be a red-tailed hawk this afternoon. I wasn’t quick enough to get the hawk, so it didn’t make for much of a nature video even by my low standards, so I decided I’d mess around with it and try to make a videopoem instead. Here’s the text:

If the dead can’t rest,
it’s because we won’t let them.
We storm,
we harry,
we decry,
we implore.
We make them star
in our horror shows
for that surge of adrenalin
that lets us know
we’re alive —
as if they our dear departed
were the ones out for blood.

Jamendo.com was down, so I went to the Internet Archive’s Open Source Audio collection instead and quickly found some suitable music. The main advantage of searching on Jamendo is that you can filter out Creative Commons licenses that specify “no derivatives.” But I think from now on I’ll probably try the Internet Archive first, because it seems to have much more of the kind of music I’m looking for.

*

For what it’s worth, this is my 3,000th post at Via Negativa. Granted, 466 of those are just quote-and-link posts in the Smorgasblog category. And this figure does not include the 719 Morning Porch posts, which are in a separate blog. I mention them because, in my first several years of blogging, I almost certainly would’ve included them as part of the Via Negativa stream — and someday when I stop keeping the Morning Porch record, I will probably import all those posts into the VN archives.

As luck would have it, we just passed another milestone a week ago: the 12,000th approved comment, which was left by Dana Guthrie Martin. That excludes the several thousand comments that were lost when Via Negativa moved to WordPress on April Fool’s Day, 2006. And just to keep things in perspective: I’ve logged 1,118,233 spam comments during that same period.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Amanda Palmer on Twitter, boredom, and blogging

This entry is part 6 of 20 in the series Poetics and technology

A wide-ranging discussion about the pleasures and distractions of the internet with Amanda Palmer, a musician whose DIY spirit, creative energy, and songwriting skills I deeply respect. “I think being bored is really important,” she says. Yes. I’ve sometimes thought I owe a real debt of gratitude to the optometrists and orthodonists in whose waiting rooms I spent so many endless hours of my childhood. Without them, would I ever have developed the habits of mind necessary for that kind of focused daydreaming we call writing?

But I also saw myself in Palmer’s description of her writing process, needing to be online in order to look up words on Google and explore ideas in Wikipedia. I’m not ashamed to admit that I use Wikipedia almost constantly when I write poems — who wants to risk being badly mistaken about some Norse mythology allusion, or (to cite something from my latest poem) the exact purpose of a gyroscope?

I share Palmer’s sense that the relationship with one’s blog is almost indistinguishable from a long-term, committed relationship with another person. I don’t feel that way about Twitter or Identica, though, much less Facebook. To me, those sites are more like fun, low-key parties where you can drift in and out of interesting conversations without feeling like you have to stick around.

Posted on by Joan Ryan

A Week of Ups and Downs With Via Negativa

The morning dawns, now comes the test:
‘Twas on last night. How bout the rest?
It’s on in morning, down at night.
It seems to take turns taking flight.
And just when I get used to this
It takes another nasty twist.
Now on at midnight gone at noon.
The blog has now reversed its tune.
Last night (or was it morning then?)
I snuck a blog peek once again.
Lo and behold, it was back up
But this alone can’t fill my cup.
All day I checked to see just when
The blog would go back down again.
Did Pennsylvania’s main electric
Power source go all dyspeptic?

Hey! Maybe there’ll be some relief.
My tale, once met with disbelief,
Was verified by other fans
Who crept more shyly from the stands.
GoDaddy, was this group to blame?
Could they have messed up domain name?
It seems it wasn’t fault of Dad
So Dave then wrote WebHostingPad
Who promised to redress the glitch.
In just one day they’d do the fix.
I think it’s holding. Wow! That’s good!
But still I tend to knock on wood.
I’m praying that it will not fail
And soon perhaps I can exhale.
I’m positively all off track
Till Negativa’s truly back.

—Joan Ryan

*

Thanks to Joan for the light verse, which she self-deprecatingly calls “bloggerel” (though I beg to differ: true doggerel’s distinguishing feature is that its author intends it to be serious poetry). I am also indebted to her for insisting that I had a problem, finally prompting me to post a query on Facebook and ask if anyone else was getting “server not found” messages when they tried to visit vianegativa.us. Thanks to everyone who responded there. With fifty percent reporting problems accessing the site, I knew the problem wasn’t with Joan’s ISP, as I had originally thought/hoped.

GoDaddy is where the vianegativa.us domain is registered, and WebHostingPad is where the site resides. Once I felt fairly sure the problem was with the latter and contacted tech support, they responded almost immediately: “I apologize; there was an error with the DNS settings for your domain name.” I liked the personal touch, and the fact that the fellow knew how to deploy a semicolon. Joan’s fingers are still crossed, she says, but I feel fairly certain the problem has been resolved.

—Dave

Posted on by Dave Bonta

SEO for poetry, poems, poets

This entry is part 5 of 20 in the series Poetics and technology

I don’t spend much time looking at site stats. Oh, I glance at them pretty often, but I rarely pore over them to see which posts are the most popular, who’s arriving from where, and the like. Only yesterday did it even occur to me to see what kind of statistics my blog host offers, and I’ve been with them since last March. Otherwise, I rely exclusively on the very minimal statistics provided by a WordPress plugin identical to what’s used on WordPress.com. Its main virtue as far as I’m concerned is that it doesn’t slow load-times down at all, since it doesn’t require the installation of javascript. But I also like the fact that it doesn’t tempt me to waste time looking at lots of additional information of marginal utility, as I used to do when I relied on StatCounter.com.

That said, my vanity was piqued earlier today when I took a rare, detailed look at the most popular searches that led people to my blog. Via Negativa is now the #1 result in Google for penis poetry, #2 for penis poems, #8 for penis poem, and #3 for poems about penis. (You might have to turn “safe search” off to verify these results at home.) In the non-phallic category, Via Negativa comes in at #8 for poems about movies, #1 for viking nicknames, #1 for balm of Gilead tree, and #3 for raccoon sex.

There’s a depressingly clear pattern emerging from all these inadvertently search engine-optimized (SEO) posts. All include the search term right in the title of the post: “The penis poems.” “Poems about movies.” Viking nicknames.” “Felling the balm of Gilead.” “Hot raccoon sex.”

The SEO experts are right: if you want Google juice, pander to the bots with titles only a robot could love. For example, if you want to blog a poem about giving birth, title the post “poem about giving birth,” and save the actual title for the next line. (You could always enclose it in h1 or h2 tags, if you still want to make sure it’s indexed.) I mean, I’m probably not going to change my ways anytime soon, but don’t let my stick-in-the-mud example deter you from deploying titles like the one I used for this post. (If there’s one thing guaranteed to get lots of searches, it’s a blog post about SEO.)

But please keep things in perspective. Even my most Google-friendly poems have yet to garner more than a couple thousand page views total in the 17 months since I started using WordPress.com stats. Blogging poetry may be a much better way to reach audiences than through traditional publication in print journals, but that’s relative: poetry blogs will still never attract a fraction of the readership of, say, knitting blogs, mommy blogs, or (lord help us) political opinion blogs. And sadly, it seems that only a vanishingly small percentage of those who go online every day in search of information about the human male sex organs say to themselves, “Hey! I wonder if there are any really good poems about it?”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

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!

Posted on by Dave Bonta

“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.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

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.
Posted on by Dave Bonta

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.

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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.

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

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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.